Why is MS doing spam checks first?

[Glenn Steen]

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On 03/12/05, Julian Field <MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
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> Remco Barendse wrote:
>
> > That's why I thought it would be nifty if the scanning order would be
> > user settable. I know that I will never get more mail than this but
> > virusscanning first could take out the really nasty peaks in traffic
> > we are seeing now.
>
> Unfortunately this is really awkward in the current architecture, and
> isn't a practical proposition without serious amounts of work on my part
> (weeks worth). Sorry, the current architecture was not designed with
> this in mind. It may sound like a simple switch, but its not,
> unfortunately. I had to make a few basic assumptions when designing it,
> and this was one of them.

It's late, and I've enjoyed entirely too much wine, and I've not
reviewed this thread particularly much,, but still.... If one
perceives this as problem, then why not do some simple AV-scanning at
the MTA level first? milter-clamav or some such comes to mind. Then
let the rest (MS/SA/other AVs) kick in on everything that survives the
initial check.
Anyway, just a thought. This pops up from time to time, and the longer
I've used MS, the less... necessary... the "changeability" of order
seems to me.

> I'm sure it would be better if the whole thing was built from some kind
> of trendy plug-in modular architecture, like Apache, but that's beyond
> my programming experience and knowledge. I'm not a computer scientist or
> a professionally trained programmer, I'm entirely self-taught.

Best kind:-).
I'm rather the other way around... Started as a "trained" programmer
(in ancient history:-), but slowly diffundated(sp?) over to more
traditional sysadm. Taught myself perl though.... Can't really say the
traditional training in imperative and functional prog langs really
helped much:-):-) Guess I'm just trying to say "Thanks for a great
product", in a rather roundabout and... mellow way:-)

>
> - --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
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(snip)

--
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se

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