[PLUG] On the topic of spam & MS-virii

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, AthlonRob wrote:

> Paul's method doesn't accept the message, decide not to deliver it,
> look up the owner of the IP, and email them... Paul's method manages
> to scan the emails BEFORE saying it will accept them for delivery.
> This way, the burden of notification lies on the sending server (and
> in the case of viruses with their own smtp engines, no bounce email
> is ever generated).
>
> I'd be interested to hear exactly how Paul manages this... if I
> understand things properly, this is what Sendmail w/ Milter is able
> to do?

That's exactly right. Scanning for viruses and spam happens during the
SMTP transaction. If the milter app doesn't like the inbound message,
sendmail rejects the message before it was accepted for delivery.
Then, as you said, "the burden of notification lies on the sending
server."

> Tie that in with AMaViSd-new and you'd no longer have to worry about
> generating bounce messages.

See http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/README.milter.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>