Fighting Viruses with MailScanner

By Alexander Prohorenko

October 6, 2003

(Fighting Viruses with MailScanner :  Page 1 of 1 )

So, one day you get tired of Klez-s viruses and you decide to put anti-virus software on your servers, so no viruses will be able to get to users' mailboxes, and will not from there continue populating into the corporate network, creating headaches for you and all your employees. Good choice! But what will you install? From all the anti-virus products available I choose the open source MailScanner utility—it works, and it works nicely in partnership with other virus-fighting tools.

MailScanner is actually just a list of Perl scripts, which can be used with any combination of 14 different virus scanners such as Sophos or McAfee. MailScanner also works as a spam filter. This article will walk through installation and setup of MailScanner on SuSE Linux 7.2. This Linux distribution came with the anti-virus interface Amavis, but that requires modification of the Mail Transport Agent's configuration files. Not very scary, but why should we do that, if we have another way?

In theory, all anti-virus interfaces work the same way as the others: First of all it puts the incoming message somewhere, then it checks the message with MailScanner or Amavis, then a clean letter goes back to the MTA for delivery to the user. Whether infected messages will be deleted or disinfected depends on your settings. This setup can work by adding rules into the MTA configuration script, or by running the MTA with special arguments—it doesn't matter.

Well, so as mentioned above, we have SuSE Linux 7.2, sendmail as the MTA, McAfee as the virus scanner and MailScanner for message handling. First of all we have to install McAfee. That's easy—by using the default settings of the installation script, McAfee will install itself into /usr/local/uvscan. We will not change anything. Then, we will download MailScanner 4.24 and unpack it somewhere. After that we have to copy the "mailscanner" directory into, for example, /opt. When finished with this, we will copy all scripts from McAfee to the directory where MailScanner is installed.

 Page 1 of 1