MailScanner + Zimbra...anyone done it before?

[James Gray]

Hi All,

The company that currently finances my lifestyle has installed Zimbra  
(www.zimbra.com) as their preferred collaboration suite.  However,  
after running it since May this year, I've come to the conclusion  
their implementation of SpamAssassin and ClamAV in Zimbra (via  
Amavis) is really poorly done.  Modifying the SA config is cumbersome  
and there is nothing available to check SA rules before installing  
them ("suck it and see", is about as good as it gets).  Even worse  
though, is there is no ability to notify a user if a message was  
quarantined by SA - it just never gets delivered and falls out of  
quarantine after "X" days.  Plus the attachment scanning is really  
quite mediocre.  Don't get me wrong, as a *BASIC* antispam/antivirus  
setup it's got ticks in all the boxes, but having been spoilt with  
MailScanner's flexibility and fine-grained configuration for years,  
it's hard to go back to a less-capable setup.

So my question to the list: has anyone ever tried to integrate  
MailScanner with Zimbra?  Essentially Zimbra just uses Postfix as its  
MTA, so that's not too hard.  However, it's all the "other" little  
things that I haven't thought of yet that worry me.  Some of the  
things I have thought of are:

1. The Zimbra system has a "ham at ..." and "spam at ..." user where users  
send false positives/negatives.  These end up in a mailbox that is  
stored in a MySQL database, ie, no file-system maildir folders.  So  
assuming I want an automated learning script to pull the messages out  
and feed them to SA, I guess I'll have to use fetchmail or something  
similar to get the messages first.  Right?  Or would I be better off  
hacking something up to read them directly from the DB?

2. Mailwatch.  Zimbra has its own MySQL daemon, so rather than  
doubling up, I guess I can just create a "MailWatch" instance in  
there and feed it as per normal.

3. Quarantine and releasing mail, MailScanner's own notifications  
etc.  In short, there is no "sendmail" binary included with Zimbra.   
I have a separate exim binary but it's config is designed to send  
mail to the Internet as the "HELO/EHLO" host name Zimbra uses is not  
the same as the reverse of our external IP...so exim handles outbound  
mail.  Short of adding a new configuration file for exim to deliver  
to Zimbra's postfix, I'm not really sure how this aspect is going to  
pan out :-S

When I get all this working, I'll write up some documentation on the  
wiki if anyone is interested.

Cheers,

James
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