[novalug] Spamassasin on a mail gateway

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 02:28:20PM -0400, Arshavir Grigorian wrote:
> Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> >On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 10:15:09AM -0400, Arshavir Grigorian wrote:
> >>Chris Gordon wrote:
> AMaViS also caches Mail::SpamAssassin Perl module, as well as uses the

That's good to know. When we were using it I don't think it did that.

> daemonized ClamAV (clamd) and, hence I think the overhead of scanning
> the mail sequentially is minimal.

on this I think we will have to agree to differ.

> On another note, and this may just be me, I do not feel confortable the
> the mail scanner directly accessing the MTA queues. AMaViS plays nicely
> with Postfix because Postfix, owing to its modular design, allows for as
> many SMTP processes as necessary. The way I have it set up is that I
> have 2 SMTP processes, one of which deliveres the incoming mail to a
> port that AMaViS is listening on (10024), and another one listening on
> port 10025 for scanned/cleaned mail from AMaViS.

The discussion of whether amavis or mailscanner is better will probably
remain an issue of personal preference. I think both are good projects,
MailScanner is a better fit for me. One argument offered on the
MailScanner side is that MailScanner doesn't need to worry about
properly implementing SMTP and therefore frees itself from all related
security worries. MailScanner only needs to be concerned internally with
security from a file system perspective (aside from the functional
goals of filtering mail to eliminate viruses and other threats). Amavis
folks will likely turn the same argument around and show that it proves
amavis is better. Right now I feel MailScanner is better, you think
Amavis is better, and that is perfectly OK.

> Moreover, just like Apache, AMaViS allows for a configurable number of
> child processes to be forked off at start time which makes it very scalable.

The number of MailScanner children forked is also configurable. It is in
use on people's home system's with a single user running on old throw
away hardware on the one end and huge clustered server farms handling
millions of accounts on the other. Amavis can most likely make similar
claims.

> I don't know much about MailScanner, but it seems like AMaViS' approach
> to interacting with the MTA is cleaner.

More elegant, perhaps, from a design perspective which certainly has its
merits. But in practical coding terms, MailScanner is basically just an
elaborate and flexible text parser.

-Eric Rz.

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