clarification - email virus protection

[Etienne Goyer]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 08:50:07AM +1200, Bojan Zdrnja wrote:
> I'd recommend integration of postfix with amavis
> (http://www.amavis.org), which can be configured to work with lots of
> different virus scanning packages. Considering anti-virus programs, I'd
> recommend sophie/libsav by Sophos for good performance.
> Amavis is integrated with postfix so all mails that go through it will
> be scanned (including incoming, as well as outgoing if you put your
> server as outgoing e-mail server).

I would recommend _against_ AMaViS unless you use the most recent
deamonized version.  The traditionnal AMaViS is invoked by procmail,
which in turn must run the perl interpreter to execute AMaViS, which in
turn spawn metamail to decode the attachment and your virus scanner to
do the actual scanning.  This generate a lot of load even on a pretty 
quiet server.  I would prefer a deamonized scanner that do the MIME
decoding (a pretty intensive operation) itself, even if the scanning is
done by a third-party tool.

In the future, I plan to investigate MailScanner
(http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/) which had been recommended
to us by somebody working for an ISP.  

Just my 0.02 CDN$

-- 
Etienne Goyer                    Linux Québec Technologies Inc.
http://www.LinuxQuebec.com       etienne.goyer at linuxquebec.com
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