Cool SpamAss hold and deliver feature, can we implement that in MailScanner

[Kai Schaetzl]

Julian Field wrote on         Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:28:26 +0100:

> It doesn't need to be implemented in MailScanner at all, it's just a 
fancy
> quarantine management system. Anyone fancy writing a system like this?
> Extra add-ons like this aren't really my area, I concentrate on the core
> and leave others to "add value" by implementing systems like this.
>

We use a system called "MailCorral" since long which has a quite advanced 
management system for quarantines, it works in connection with a special 
sendmail milter of the same name, not with MailScanner, but the quarantine 
management is completely in Perl and separate. It works more or less like 
it was described here. It scans the quarantine at chosen intervals and 
mails a detailed summary to the recipient user. We all also provide an 
option in the domain's control center to start a spam report at any time. 
So, all mail for a user, no matter which email address it was sent to, 
gets summarized in one email. You either click a link for getting one 
message or quote several blocks and send them back. Same happens for virus 
mail, just that it is sent right-away, but without the body and a notice 
how to retrieve it. I already contemplated re-vamping this system, but 
fortunately we aren't pressured much at doing so at the moment :-) I use 
MailCorral on all of our client machines and MailScanner only on the 
machines which are used directly for us because MailScanner + Spamassassin 
is so ressource hungry. One the MailScanner systems I simply use Mailwatch 
for releasing quarantined messages. Not so nice but it works.

One problem I see with the current quarantine is that you don't know which 
mail is for whom. So, the script has not only to excerpt relevant parts of 
the mail, but also the target. This involves a lot more processing and 
will maybe generate several reports to a target user instead of just one. 
The quarantine system here and ours as well overcome this problem by 
naming the files in a way that you just need to scan the file names to 
know which user they are bound to. This makes it much easier. It would be 
nice if MailScanner could do something about the filenames here, however, 
I guess, you simply don't know the final recipient, because sendmail is 
responsible for the final delivery. But it might be possible to put the 
domain or target email address in the file name or at least quarantine all 
mail for one domain in a single subdirectory for each day instead of 
putting them all in one hierarchy.
Another and probably better approach would be to take out all the 
information from the MySQL DB which was already filled by Mailwatch. It 
should be everything there except for the final recipient user. Grabbing 
it from there will take much less processing. A nice extra would be to run 
a script before it and resolve all email addresses to the final user. 
That's probably the way to go and I suppose something like that is already 
in use here and there.


Kai

-- 

Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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