Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1473 mails)

[bshelton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Brad Shelton)]

On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 02:08:16PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
> 
> AMaViS works by usurping the role of procmail (/etc/sendmail.cf, "Mlocal"
> line) with a command called "scanmails". This looks into an email, and
> attempts to unpick any attachments and unzip/unarch/untar/... them into a
> temp directory, then uses your chosen antivirus S/W to scan these files;
> scanmails is actually a script, not a binary, so is (in principle ... )
> easily user-configurable.

Right. For an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) such as sendmail, qmail, etc., not
an MUA (Mail User Agent) such as your email client which uses POPmail to
receive mail.

> And thereby lies my question. NAI uvscan is fine for scanning files
> that are already "out in the open", so to speak. AMaViS seems to work
> fine for email which is delivered through sendmail (i.e. with SMTP on
> the local machine) since the changed sendmail.cf causes the mail file
> to be passed to scanmails which does the job.
> 
> However ... Here at home most mail is pulled directly to the spool file
> /var/spool/mail/whatever by XFMail using POP3, and from there explodes
> the spool file directly into XFMail's IMAP folders. It seems to me that
> this bypasses the sendmail local-delivery setup altogether, so AMaViS
> gets no chance to do its work.

So you would need the ability to bring your mail in from the ISP to your MTA
and THEN fetch it with POPmail from your local server.

> So the question is: Has anyone got any ideas about how to get mail, which
> is being pulled up by POP3 as above , to be filtered through a scanner
> before it gets dumped into the user's local Mail folders? I have a
> feeling that the scanmails script should be modifiable so as to achieve
> this, along with some suitable setting of something-or-other in maybe
> /etc/sendmail.cf, but I am finding both of these questions somewhat
> impenetrable.

Yes. Get your ISP to batch send your email to your SMTP server when you dial
up so you can set up your own scanning and read mail from your own local
queue after it has been scanned.


-- 
Brad Shelton  On Line Exchange  http://online-isp.com