Few general questions regarding MailScanner

[Matt Kettler]

At 04:47 PM 2/26/2004, Jason Williams wrote:
>What are some of the drawbacks of the two?

Drawbacks:
         Mailscanner - double queuing means extra disk IO. Unable to do
SMTP rejects.

         Mimedefang - Scans mail as-it-comes, so inbound rate limited by
scan rate.


>What can Mailscanner do that
>MIMEDefang cannot? And vice versa?

Both tools are quite versatile and flexible and most things that one can do
the other can do just as well.

Mimedefang's configuration is literally done with a fragment of perl code.
This means you're limited pretty much only by your perl coding ability.

MailScanner's configuration is limited to the options in the
MailScanner.conf. This makes the syntax much simpler, particularly if you
don't already know perl. There's methods of making most options into "rule
lists" of various sorts, but it's not quite as flexible as writing in perl
code.






>Is one more secure than the other?

Hard to say.. one could argue that since MailScanner isn't directly called
by sendmail it's a bit more isolated from any bugs in sendmail making
security holes in the milter API, but that's quite a stretch.

>  What about stability? Reliability?

I've never heard of anyone using either MailScanner or Mimedefang have any
stability/reliability problems except misconfiguration or under-powered
servers. Not to say it hasn't happened, but it's never been anything that
caused enough commotion to catch my eye.