Re: Mailscanner or amavisd-new

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 09:35, J. Roeleveld <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> That's what virusscanners and restrictive policies on the desktop are for.
> Simply blocking files for all users, including the ones with technical
> roles, causes too many problems.

Technical people may encrypt their mail or at least encrypt archives
attached to their mail if it includes files with such extensions.
Hell, it's enough to rename file mywork.exe to mywork.ex_ when
attaching it to circumvent such filtering. Is this too much for people
with technical roles? Even Microsoft preaches this approach, take a
look at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/blocked-attachments-in-outlook-HA001229952.aspx

In practice I found AV filters to be the most problematic filters at
the gateway level, at least in the Linux world. Blocking these
extensions (it's a long list, take a look at the previous link) almost
obsoletes AV filtering at the MTA level. Of course, there is malware
inside PDFs and JPEGs these days but I think it's better to scan for
such malware on the desktop. Some products also scan for phishing,
scams and other unwanted junk but SpamAssassin does a better overall
job in this regard.

-- 
mișu