Re: [Exim] New mailhub/virus/spamassassin installation.

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Author: Mike Richardson
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] New mailhub/virus/spamassassin installation.
> I would be extremely grateful or any advice both on my outlined plan and on
> appropriate virus scan enabling software etc. Also for those of you using
> spamassassin - will it happily coexist on a virus scanning machine ? etc.


We've only got one layer but we might move to two at some point.
If we did then the external machines would run AV and AS (spam assassin)
on all incoming mail and the internal machines would run just AV.
This way we can tune exiscan (demime levels, extension blocking etc)
to suit the circumstances - allowing different types of mail internally
than from external sources, plus only spam scanning incoming mail.

Exiscan means that AV and AS coexist very happily, if you ignore
that SA is extremely resource hungry compared to AV. We had serious
issues during a recent trial (average 5-10s delay accepting mail, time-outs,
duplicate mail) so stopped using SA. I really do believe that hub
based content filtering for spam is more trouble than it is worth for
a variety of technical, political and support reasons. There are desktop
tools which are much better.

Assuming that your internal hubs are of a vaguely decent spec then
adding AV ought not be an issue. At least initially a large proportion
of our virus traffic was from internal sources but once infected
our users were pretty quick to clean up their acts so the loading wasn't
great.

You might want to consider suggestions such as running something like
sophie on a separate box(es) to take off some AV load. Same could be
done with AS. (I've never tried this but it sort of makes sense.)

Mike
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