Re: [Exim] Virus | Spam tagging

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, SH Solutions wrote:

> I read a lot about clamav, which I have installed, but I also read,
> that it could fail multiple times a day. In that case, exim would
> fail also.

I can't comment on that from practical experience, but what do you
mean by "exim would fail"? Surely the worst that would happen is that
the mail would be temporarily refused, and tried again later (at least
by bona fide senders - some spammers don't bother to retry, which can
make the occasional temporary failure quite beneficial ;-)

> I also read a lot about spamasassin, do I have to risk the same here?

The way that we have it set up, if spamd fails - which it does
occasionally, though not often - then the mail is accepted without
being spam-rated. So the spam load goes up temporarily, until the
spamd gets restarted (there's a cron task that checks it and
resuscitates it if necessary, but it's very rarely necessary).

> I would not mind, that in case of any problems mail would get
> delivert without any scanning. But i would mind, if may would not be
> delivered.

I don't believe that will happen, at least we've not seen any evidence
of it in practice. More likely, if something goes wrong near the end
of the DATA phase (which is what we are talking about), the risk is
that the same mail will be delivered twice, i.e one attempt to send to
us is accepted but the far end thinks it failed, so they send it
again later.

The whole mail setup is designed to fail on the safe side, if it fails
at all.