Few general questions regarding MailScanner

[Ugo Bellavance]

>
>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?

What do you mean, a kind of honeypot?  A whitelist?  A blacklist?

I think it can do what you need.  And if you have a great suggestion, Julian usually implement it in a timely fashion.  For example, because of the new viruses, he changed the code to make MailScanner go into zip files and block password-protected zip files.  This is in the new version, and, of course, configurable.

Personnaly, in my sendmail's access file, I refuse mail for sales at mydomain.  This way, I doesn't even get to mailscanner. (of course, sales at mydomain is not a valid adress where I work, we don't sell anything.

>
>How well does MS work as a mail gateway? 

Very well.  It think most of us use it as a gateway.  At first, I was just looking to prevent acces to my exchange machine from the internet.  I got virus filtering and spam control at the same time!

>Any known problems? 

There are some problems, but Julian alwasys solve them really, really quickly.  I think MailScanner is very reliable for everyone here.  We all got a few config problems at the beginning, but once you understand the program's working and config options, it is a piece of cake.  Of course, following what is happening on this mailing list helps you prevent situations like "ah, I needed that for the new version?".  But as I said, bugs are fixed very quickly.  The only thing is to make sure you have proper hardware to support it.  But, a dual xeon server can filter 1.5 Million of messages per day, it is not expensive.  I un-retired an old PII-233 server to run MailScanner.

>What about the
>outgoing mail part?

No more problems there.  Usually less problem, in fact, since we usually use rules that makes less filtering for outgoing messages (filename, filetype, spam whitelist)

>
>I appreciate it.

hth
>
>Jason
>
Ugo