North American Network Operators Group
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Re: antivirus in smtp, good or bad?

  • From: Matthew Sullivan
  • Date: Wed Feb 04 01:04:31 2004 
Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
Hi,
When investigating our mail queue it seems we have quite a lot of mails which are stuck in transit...

Whats happening is we're accepting the mail as the primary MX for the domain but
the user has setup a forwarding to another account at another ISP, they have
antivirus service on that other account. So we get the mail, spool it and try to
forward it but then we get a "550 Error: Suspected W32/[email protected] virus" after
DATA and our server freezes the mail.

Surely this is an incorrect way to do this as there will be lots of similar MXs like ours backing this mail up? They should accept the mail and then bounce it?

That's what I just wrote a patch into Postfix to do.... ( http://www.isux.com/projects/ if anyone is interested, uses libclamav )

This is the only way I can see the virus laden mails should be dealt with - you certainly cannot return it to the sender, that is _most_ annoying, causes no end of users to call the support desk about being virus laden when they haven't actually been infected etc...

/ Mat