[CentOS] mail server best practices question

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Tue May 11 03:02:02 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 09:40 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 11, 2010 06:07 AM, Craig White wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 20:33 +0200, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> >> Am 10.05.2010 14:02, schrieb Brian McKerr:
> >>
> >>> I use Mailscanner with postfix and Mailwatch to manage quarantine etc;
> >>>
> >>> http://mailscanner.info/
> >>
> >> I don't intend to start a flamewar, but given Wieste's repeated warnings
> >> on the Postfix mailinglist[1] and expressed on
> >>
> >> http://www.postfix.org/addon.html
> >>
> >> as
> >>
> >> "mailscanner system, works with Postfix and other MTAs. WARNING: This
> >> software uses unsupported methods to manipulate Postfix queue files
> >> directly. This will result in corruption or loss of mail. The
> >> mailscanner authors have sofar refused to discuss a proper access API or
> >> protocol."
> >>
> >> I call that combination not being best practice.
> > ----
> > clearly this is a personal issue that Wietse has with Julian (the author
> > of MailScanner) and I can assure all that it works fine with Postfix and
> > has never caused either corruption or loss of mail on many servers that
> > I have configured to use both. There are also a lot of users who run
> > MailScanner with Postfix.
> >
> 
> I don't know about that. If it was sendmail, fine because sendmail does 
> provide mechanisms for multiple access to a mail in the queue which is 
> how sendmail itself treats mails in the queue when you have multiple 
> queue runners. I have not used exim so as far as I know, only sendmail 
> actually tolerates a third-party touching mails in the queue.
----
clearly this isn't rocket science and the manipulation of the mail queue
is rather straight forward and hardly worth all of the rancor that
Wietse seems to direct towards Julian/MailScanner.

I started with Sendmail and MailScanner was written with Sendmail in
mind and adapted later for Exim & Postfix. When I was trying to switch
to Postfix, I couldn't stand amavisd and went back to MailScanner and
decided to just ignore the warnings from Wietse and I discovered that
many on the MailScanner list came to the same conclusion.

With reference to your other message in this thread, MailScanner calls
spamd/clamd as part of the process but the real value in my mind is the
granular handling in MailScanner which is sort of complete overkill but
it totally works and scratches about every itch you ever had in running
a mail server.

Craig


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