MTA preferences for use with MailScanner

[Mike Andrews]

Chris <racerx at MAKEWORLD.COM>  wrote:

[snip]          I got my tail whacked for asking why
MailScanner does not work well wih Postfix.

Yes, yes - I know. There are docs out there that lets you do it, but it
seems they are unsupported and not a safe way to use postfix.

Allow me to paste fro the Postfix archives:
------------
MailScanner does its work by grabbing files out of the queue, runs its
processing, and drops the resulting file back into another postfix
queue.  This is not a documented method to perform content filtering in
postfix.

The problem is that there is no reliable way for a non-postfix program to
determine when it's safe to grab the queue file.  So it's never safe for
an
external program to grab a queue file when postfix is running.

So MailScanner will randomly grab an incomplete file, resulting in loss of
a random portion of that message, with no warning and no indication that
part of the message was lost.  Apparently it *usually* works, but you
can't
tell when it doesn't.  Software that by design *usually* works is not
acceptable.

Therefore, MailScanner is unreliable with postfix.  This does not offer an
opinion about MailScanner with other MTAs, only postfix.

If you want to use MailScanner, don't use postfix.  If you want to use
postfix, choose a different content filtering method, there are several
documented filtering methods and many reliable third-party products to
chose from that work properly with postfix.
------------

However, it works for me, so what can I say.


--
Best regards,
Chris

========================================================================

Many, many thanks to all for the comments and experiences, which have
proved extremely
useful and enlightennig.

I'm about to try exim; it looks like I need to find or write a perl script
to read sendmail access llines
and produce exim filter lines.

Now if I can just get the PTB to dump Bloated Goats in favor of a Real
Mailsystem  ... .

[walks away, grumbling]

--
Mike Andrews
Information Security
Technical Services Division
Oklahoma Dept. of Transportation
mandrews at odot.org

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