January 23rd, 2007
ClamAV and Sendmail
Yesterday night I spent more than five hours on a FreeBSD 6.1 system in testing the clamav-milter service. Do you remember my last post, in which I wrote about the need to migrate all my SMTP front-end systems to the FreeBSD platform in order to achieve a better security check on incoming e-mail traffic? Now I’m able to run a Sendmail daemon tailored to my corporate needs which works together with a good (and free) virus scanning engine, dropping infected e-mails at the SMTP connection stage without generating any NDR (Non-Delivery Report) to the sender address. Also the reporting feature (an e-mail to the postmaster mailbox) in case of virus detection fits well in my environment, where there is no scheduled notification sent to the postmaster address.
I had to work a lot to find the best installation method for my production environment: after I built all the packages needed by ClamAV (by inserting the right flags during the make process) I was able to setup the latest version of the product on the production systems without installing the ports collection. Now I want to observe it running for some days before migrating the primary SMTP front-end system too.