Few general questions regarding MailScanner

[Jason Williams]

Hello everyone,

I appreciate the replies. I'm trying to make a decision now on what I want
to use.

>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.

Hmm. Interesting. Where as I really dont see any problem, I see a matter of
personal preference.

>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.

I understand that. If someone is not well versed in Perl, you could be
'lacking' in your ability to take full advantage of MIMEDefang. On the
other hand, it could be incentive to learn Perl better. :)


>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.

I installed Mailscanner and found all of the files that you can edit. There
are indeed a lot of options. Options are good.


>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.


That is understandable. Most problems are probably user end problems.
The decision comes down to what I want to do.

I'm going to use a Mail gateway for our company that will sit on our DMZ.
It will scan all incoming mail for viruses and spam and take action
accordingly.
Would this pose any problems? For instance, is there any way I can set up
Mailscanner to have a list of valid users to receive email for in attempts
to block out some of the spam crud?

How well does MS work as a mail gateway? Any known problems? What about the
outgoing mail part?

I appreciate it.

Jason