av-spammers

[Martin Hepworth]

Brian

thankyou for your article regarding some 'bad' things that happen with
anti-virus and spam systems.

But I feel I must correct you on a couple of points

1) MailScanner does not 'name' viruses. The name of the latest
'MyDoom/Novarg" virus you attribute to MailScanner is in fact the name
used by ClamAV, the open source virus scanner.

2) MailScanner is merely a wrapper scripper (a very good one!) for
Spamassassin, RBL's and over a dozen virus scanning engines (commercial
and free). It an be configured 'not' to bounce any spam or virus
messages. This is the default in current versions, but people may not be
upgrading, or upgrading their config to the current default for this
setting.

A product with a large userbase (and one of the first commericial email
gateway scanners) is Mailsweeper by Clearswift. Perhaps you'd to see how
that 'performs' as well. Again this relies on third party virus
scanners, but does have its own anti-spam system.

I totally agree with the virus 'name game' issues. It wasn't that long
ago that things seemed to be much more standard, but in the last few
months the names have digressed from 'standards'.

Overall a good article, which reminds us that 'bouncing' spam/virus
notices is a 'bad thing(tm)' in todays environment, but that many
unpatched/non-upgraded systems out there (not just AV/spam systems), the
problem IMHO falls down to poor systems administration and poor change
management in general not just for AV systems.

--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300


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