What long term VMPro yum update problems would we run into with mailscanner installed? It appears that RH is going to keep spamassassin in the dark ages on their 3.x CentOS and this spam is really starting to impact our services and resources.

I don't know if, here in the states, the affair with SpamHaus.org opened things up or what but spamassassin doesn't seem to be working at all on this stuff.

Hey Dan,

I would strongly discourage use of Mailscanner with Postfix. Wietse Venema (the author of Postfix) has stated emphatically that the method Mailscanner uses is unsafe and will lose mail with Postfix.

Besides that, Mailscanner isn't a spam filter. It ties into SpamAssassin and ClamAV (among other things) for scanning, and does no scanning of its own. Using Mailscanner instead of procmail won't stop any additional spam, because the decisions they make will be directed by the same underlying software. If you want a newer version of SpamAssassin, you'll still have to install a newer version of SpamAssassin with Mailscanner.

There was a long discussion of Mailscanner in this issue in the tracker:

http://www.virtualmin.com/ticket-tracker/bug?bug%5fnumber=256

Rather than re-hash the discussion, I'll just point you to it.

I'll also mention that we'll be adding at least one other filtering product to the default deployment of Virtualmin as soon as possible.

I would recommend against MailScanner unless you're also planning to switch to Sendmail. If there's some feature of Mailscanner you like over our procmail recipes, let me know, and we'll see about getting it implemented.

Just wanted to point out, there are two sides to every story. MailScanner is an excellent piece of software, used by thousands of large sites (including Postfix) without any problems. For more information on this issue, please read:

The Politics behind Postfix and Mailscanner
http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:configuration:mta:postfix:politics

That being said, personally, I run MailScanner with Sendmail on a separate box. MailScanner works great as an external "mail gateway", which can be a front-end to literally any mail server, including Microsoft Exchange. This removes all of the heavy load from the overhead of scanning messages for viruses and spam from the server that is being used to access user mailboxes and perform other Virtualmin functions, such as web sites, user databases, etc. As an added benefit, MailScanner can scan each message with multiple spam and virus scanners, including custom programs to filter out any type of unwanted messages, so ClamAV and SpamAssassin aren't the only options.

MailScanner also has an excellent free interface for managing all incoming and outgoing mail, determining and reporting spam, managing the queue, generating statistics and reports, etc. For more information on this program, including pretty screen shots, see:

http://MailWatch.SourceForge.net/

Best of all, these programs integrate perfectly with Virtualmin!

Actually we've gone back to sendmail awhile ago. I'm getting frustrated that spamassassin apparently isn't reading the mail. When deleting and reporting, I've always to my knowledge gotten the prompt :
Reporting the selected messages to Razor and other SpamAssassin spam-blocking databases ..
Learned from 0 messages.

.. done, and deleted message too.


In the settings for spamassassin on CentOS, are razor, Pyzor, DCC even installed? When I looked for razor.conf (default is ~/razor.conf) I can't find it, nor anything Pyzor or DCC.

Oh, in an earlier reference I'd mentioned "X-tis-spam: =?us-ascii?"

That's actually part of the spam header inserted by TrendMicro's PCCillun spam function on the local client. My error.