[courier-users] Mailscanner and Courier

[John Rudd]

Someone else suggested that I use Blackhole as a means of working with Mailscanner. Blackhole doesn't really do what I want, the way I want, so I'm probably not going to go that direction.


The way mailscanner works is that it has an incoming mail queue which is seperate from the normal mail queue. You run two sendmail daemons, one is running in queue-only mode listening on port 25, and the other processes the normal queue, like:

sendmail -Oqueueonly -OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue.in -bd
sendmail -q15m

(the second sendmail using a queue directory of /var/spool/mqueue)

Mailscanner then looks in /var/spool/mqueue.in at the files that have been left there, parses them out and scans them for mime errors, viruses, attachments with dangerous file names, does RBL checks if you want them, and does spam assassin marking if you want it. Then you can set various actions for things, such as "delivering spam with the results in headers", "deleting spam", "bouncing", etc.

The catch is that the files in /var/spool/mqueue.in need to be in sendmail's queue format (qf* for headers, df* for the body, and then xf*, tf*, etc. for other things). You don't need to worry as much about what happens after the message is processed because it just invokes the command line sendmail program (such as /usr/lib/sendmail). That latter part is easily compatible with courier, if I correctly understand courier's sendmail program to be fairly standard. It's the former part that is questionable.


The two ways I can think of to make this work with courier are:

1) run sendmail as the port 25 daemon (the queue only version, the first of the two commands I listed above), and have mailscanner do the processing normally ... but tell it to run courier's sendmail when it's done processing each message.

2) I've asked the mailscanner people to look in to running mailscanner itself as the port 25 daemon (would simplify certain things, including adding the ability to directly reject messages instead of only being able to attempt to bounce them). Mailscanner's developer says he doesn't have time to add specific ports for things like qmail and qmail-like MTA's, so this is probably as close as mailscanner would come to working with courier directly.

3) can courier's port 25 daemon run in queue only mode, and produce queue files that look like sendmail's queue files? (alternately, it might be possible to get mailscanner to process rfc (forget the number) compliant messages, where the entire message is in one file ... can courier produce those?) And then mailscanner would, again, invoke courier for normal message handling after it's done scanning?


Does anyone have other thoughts or ideas on how to make mailscanner and courier work together? The other solution would be to keep sendmail and mailscanner on our SMTP servers, and only run courier on our POP/IMAP servers. But, I was hoping to use courier, both as SMTP and POP/IMAP on all of the machines. (right now, we have 2 SMTP servers doing mailscanner and 1 POP server that only accepts messages from the SMTP servers ... but I'd rather have more distributed processing with SMTP and POP/IMAP on all 3 machines using courier's ability to work well with NFS as a means of distributing the load across all 3 machines).

Though, that works at work. At home, I only have one machine doing my mail service. So, at home, I'd have to go with something like #1's sendmail->mailscanner->courier solution.






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