Tony Earnshaw wrote:
To my (tiny) mind (you're a great deal more gifted than me), OP is
trying to equate AV salients to dspam.
I can't believe what I've started here!!!
I do not equate AV with anti-spam. They are different things entirely.
That is not to say that they don't have some things in common (I might
regret saying that but stay with me...). They're both software packages
that need installing and maintaining. They both have an impact on the
passage of email through a mail server. They both are capable of being
misconfigured, and therefore they both need testing.
To perform a basic test of AV I can send EICAR through my mail system
and see whether it gets through. I know that if the AV is functional and
configured correctly it will catch it, because all AV scanners (that I
know of, anyway) do catch EICAR.
To perform a basic test of SA I could send GTUBE through similarly, and
in principle there's no reason why dspam should not also have an option
to enable checking for GTUBE, even if only a basic regex that ran before
any other tests and was easily disabled. I am NOT saying that this (a)
would be easy to add (I have no idea!), or (b) needs to be added, I am
just saying I would find it useful and when I started this thread I was
simply asking if dspam supported a mechanism like this. It could
certainly do this without in any way pretending to be an AV scanner (and
indeed it would be a very bad thing if dspam were made to catch EICAR as
well). Indeed I could probably make postfix catch GTUBE itself if I
wanted to (without making postfix an AV scanner or an anti-spam device)
but it wouldn't tell me anything about whether I had dspam configured
correctly or not.
And to clarify another point: I'm here at dspam-users because I too have
long ago given up with SA; I don't want dspam to be SA at all. I didn't
even know GTUBE existed or that SA did something like this until I was
told about it in this thread.
I'm an LDAP person, others are SQL people. DO NOT TRY TO EQUATE
ANYTHING (*NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING*) TO DO WITH LDAP TO SQL. Do not
even try. This is a parallel.
Etc.
I have to explain to people (=Windows users) the difference between
Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, which is a much more subtle distinction. If
I can do that I am confident that I can tell spam and viruses apart!
I've been around long enough to remember Green Card and the days before
SPAM was anything more than a cheap meat product and a Monty Python
sketch, and I remember the days when viruses travelled by floppy disk
not email.
Therefore I can only apologise for what must clearly have been a very
bad job of explaining what I was after when I started this thread!
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
