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Best Antivirus Options for a Mailserver? 91

Posted by Cliff from the remember-when-email-viruses-were-a-myth dept.
CSIP asks: "I am setting up a small mailserver, with ~500 users, across 80 domains. I'm planning to use qmail-scanner and an antivirus scanner to block incoming viruses. I would prefer to use ClamAV, however I've read conflicting reports on its effectiveness. The commercial scanners appear to detect 99.X% however they are licensed per-user, which at 500+ users becomes quite the annual bill. What is everyone's experience with ClamAV? Are their other commercial scanners that allow you to license on a per-server basis?" The best indicator of quality for a virus scanner is the information in its virus database. How do ClamAV's virus definitions compare to commercial scanners, like McAfee's?
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Best Antivirus Options for a Mailserver? More

Best Antivirus Options for a Mailserver?

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  • ClamAV (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have been using ClamAV for about 6 months, and so far its blocked a few viruses. So far so good.

    • Re:ClamAV (Score:2, Insightful)

      by revmoo ( 652952 )
      I have been using ClamAV for about 6 months, and so far its blocked a few viruses. So far so good.

      Score:1, Interesting

      Right....

  • You'd be better off... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ophidian P. Jones ( 466787 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:00PM (#8456577)
    Using a fuzzy checksum tool like DCC [rhyolite.com] to block similarly worded messages. It will catch both spams and viruses.

    Most viruses spread so quickly that the AV tools' databases are inevitably out of date and ineffective.
    • Most viruses spread so quickly that the AV tools' databases are inevitably out of date and ineffective.

      That wasn't really true until just a week ago when I had to manually update my f-prot twice in one day to catch the new Neksky variants. I had it set at once a day for the longest time, set it for twice a day a month ago and it's now at every four hours. The updated db got them right away, the delay (in my case) was me doing the update in the first place.

      F-prot and SpamAssassin with Courier-MTA [gentoo.org], BTW.

      • F-prot does indeed rock, for a home user, you can setup a linux box, use postfix,fetchmail,f-prot, procmail and spam assassin. Top it off with Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird, and spam/viruses are so much easier to deal with.
        F-prot catchs most viruses, the rest seem to be on a blocked list, so I'm pretty happy with f-prot. In fact, I use f-prot to scan all the file-systems also, not just for email. F-prot has to be the easiest command line scanner out.

        And if you want, you can use procmail/fetchmail and hotpop
    • SpamAssassin is also good for this: it lets people know up front that there's an executable there, so if the user has half a brain, he should know not to click on it.

      That's the idea, anyway. Of course, the most common elements on this planet are hydrogen and stupidity...

  • Clam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ADRA ( 37398 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:10PM (#8456668)
    I don't know how many virus signatures it detects, but I can say that our company of only 30 ppl has yet to receive a virus through Clam.

    We did have Norton AV/Exchange running when we used exchange as a front line server. It was also pretty good about viruses except for the first day of CodeRed I believe where it was 1/2 after the first emails showed up. We only paid once and the updates never seemed to discontinue after the year, so maybe its just support/assurance that you're paying for. Consult the contract if in doubt.

    • Re:Clam (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RedHat Rocky ( 94208 )
      Used to use Sophos to scan email coming into a qmail server. Switched to ClamAV a couple of months ago and have never regretted it.

      I do think they deserve some support from the community, I'm considering what to do in my workplace. A mirror would be possible but the mirror terms are a little out of the ordinary.

      • Re:Clam (Score:1)

        by CSIP ( 31272 )
        Yep... I had the same thought about mirroring, seems its one per country or something like that, with the mirror for my location already ran by a company my best friend works for.

        looked like the support they wanted was virus signatures, etc as the more of those, the more reliable it is.

        I just wanted to be safe, and not switch to this without checking it out first.

        thanks!

    • Re:Clam (Score:3, Informative)

      by phoenix_rizzen ( 256998 )
      The current database scans for more than 20,000 viruses and variants.

  • there's always the blowtorch on an ant method! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:13PM (#8456695)
    The Blowtorch on an Ant method: Block all email with attachments.

    Now, granted, with 500 users, I'm going to assume that is not an option for you as people likely send files back and forth via email quite often.

    Still, I just wanted to point out that blocking email with attachments is probably the most effective antivirus option for a mailserver, though certainly not the best solution.

  • best Anti Virus Protection (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The best Anti Virus protection for your mail server is to not let anyone recive mail =)

    But since that's not going to work you need to enforce a strict policy "If you open a virus I chop off a finger"

    This should work for you unless you have someone that just doesn't learn

  • ClamAV vs. Commercial (Score:5, Informative)

    by OneFix at Work ( 684397 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:17PM (#8456736)
    There's a good post [mail-archive.com] detailing the ClamAV vs. Commercial question...

    To paraphrase, ClamAV's database is generally at least a few days ahead of sophos and sometimes weeks...

    ClamAV was written from the ground-up to do mail scanning, so it should be better than commercial scanners that try to be everything to everyone...
    • It's true. We've been using a combination of MailScanner [mailscanner.info], Spamassassin [spamassassin.org], and ClamAV [sourceforge.net] on ours and a number of customer mailservers for a little over a year now. Don't seem to remember any viruses getting through, and many times Clam has an update before the commercial vendors. It's also got _great_ support through the mailing list(s). I would recommend ClamAV wholeheartedly.
      • Just out of curiosity, how many of you ClamAV users give back to them with either money and/or some sort of service? Keeping such an up to date database is a full time job, is the communtiy supporting them well enough?
        Regards,
        Steve

  • ClamAV (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Evanrude ( 21624 ) <david AT fattyco DOT org> on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:21PM (#8456791) Homepage Journal
    The ClamAV client is great for scanning email, but it is best used with another scan engine, such as amavis-ng [sourceforge.net].

    I own a company that uses the ClamAV+Amavis-ng configuration internally and implements the solution for clients. We've never seen a virus come through the system yet.

    When you combine these tools with SpamAssassin you have a fairlyy "safe" email system.

  • Chain Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:26PM (#8456841) Homepage Journal

    Not recommending anything in particular, but you can chain together different tools to filter more completely than a single line of defense both against viruses and against spam.

    IIRC, at MyCorp, Exchange servers are insulated from the outside by both PerlMX [perl.com] and Tumbleweed [dmoz.org].

  • I also run a mailserver, but for a company of 50ish, over a dozen or so domains.
    At first I converted it from exim to qmail with qmail-scanner, then replaced qmail-smtpd with qpsmtpd.
    As we already have licencing for f-prot I used that, but it soon failed to pick up a variant of Swen. So I simple added the clamav plugin and stopped the variant (gibe) dead.

    I probably should build some stats on which scanner detects what, but we've only had a few netsky variants before one or the other updated.
    With at least th

  • Here's an idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gklinger ( 571901 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:34PM (#8457004)
    It would take a bit of server side scripting but it shouldn't be that hard to implement. If someone gets a piece of email with an attachement, any binary attachment, strip it out and save it out somewhere (~/mail/attachments or ~/public_html/mail/attachments, wherever is easiest given your system's configuration) and in its place include a text attachment that says something like, "This email came with an attachment. This could be a virus. We recommend you exercise caution when dealing attachments. You may download/view the attachment at [give URL pointing to wherever you saved it]."

    If it's a picture or a word document from a friend or colleague then they'll probably end up viewing it in their browser and if it's a binary, provided it came from a trusted source, they can download it (make sure to give them an option to delete it if they'll feel it isn't benign). If it's something they don't recognize and/or from someone they don't recognize, they're going to be a bit more cautious. The idea is that the extra step prevents people who open all attachements without thinking or, worse yet, run email clients which allow attachments to rape their computer without their knowing, from harming themselves.

    If anyone complains, tell them this is the email version of "Are you sure you want to delete that file?" -- it's a pause that forces reflection that may end up saving them grief. They'll learn to live with the added step and eventually, they'll be glad it's there to protect them.

    • Don't want to sound like a flame,but have you *ever* worked with end users? They will have your hide before you even get halfway explaining this, let alone allow you to contemplate implementing this. If it is a word virus, they will view it in their browser, that simply fires up word, and thus lets you execute whatever 3l337 macro sh*t is going in there, and if it is a binary from a trused source they will reflect and *then* think about launching or not? bets are it is "nakedchix.exe", sent to you by your b
      • Depends on how well-trained you have your lusers and how well they have come to trust your judgement. If they think you're the know-it-all IT guy, well, then yeah, I could see that reaction.

      • Re:Here's an idea... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gklinger ( 571901 )
        Don't want to sound like a flame,but have you *ever* worked with end users?

        I've admined corporate networks with between five hundred and a thousand clients and admined ISPs with five times as many so yeah, I've dealt with end users. It was my experience that you can either marvel at their stupidity and bang your head on your desk or marvel at their stupidity, try to help and educate them and then bang your head on your desk. I found the latter gave me the always heartwarming excuse, "I tried."

        At any rat

    • Ok, this may sound a bit lazy, but should I be forced to launch my browser getting an attachment from a mail? The feature of adding attachments to mails mainly exists to *not* do this, IMHO.

      But when you're already willing to take the step and teach the users something new, why not instead tell them to use a different, more secure, mail app (like Mozilla, Evolution etc.)? They still have to learn something new, but can stick to the lazy behaviour and save attachments as they are used to. I'm sure they'd s
    • If anyone complains, tell them this is the email version of "Are you sure you want to delete that file?"

      Great, the "Are you sure" thing has been proven to be very poor UI.
  • Using clamAV in combination with qmail (using qmail-scanner and the qmail-queue patch) on a debian box. It's caught a bunch of viruses (most recently all of these stupid doom variants), though I don't know how quickly the definitions are updated. I would imagine that is where the concern would be. I also wouldn't know if viruses made it through, as I run linux on my workstations/laptop. I only installed clamAV to help protect others using my mail server. I haven't heard any complaints so far, though.

  • Vexira Antivirus (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PinkX ( 607183 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:53PM (#8457262) Homepage
    It has a very similar licencing scheme to what RAV used to offer (before they were bought out by The Evil Empire [microsoft.com]. They license by domain, with a maximum of 3000 users.

    It integrates easily with any MTA (works as a proxy), including my favorite qmail. Runs over Linux and various *BSD's. I've succesfully installed it over Debian (even thought only RPM packages are provided - they can be easily converted to .deb or whatever other package format your distro uses with the help of Alien). And you could always use it together with ClamAV, to doule-check your mail messages for viruses.

    They also offer an antivirus solution for Samba servers, which provides real-time scanning and blocking of files when opened/closed from the network. It comes with a fixed price for server with an unlimited number of users and shares to protect.

    The recomendation may com from a little closer - my company is a Vexira Reseller. But all in all it's a good solution and IMHO it has the most convenient licencing scheme.

    For more info visit: Vexira Website [centralcommand.com].

    Regards,


    • The biggest reason I have to use ClamAV is because almost no one else supports OS X. I didn't find any besides ClamAV that weren't a all-in-one mail server, which I'm not going to bother with.

      If Vexira would have supported OS X when I was looking, I would have bought it.

  • something to check for in your AV scanner (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @06:55PM (#8457292)
    Make sure your mail-server-based AV scanner can check inside attachments that are archives (zip, etc.), and not just individual documents. Many of the latest attachment-based viruses reside inside compressed archives. Also make sure it can tell the difference between an attached file's extension, and it's real format, as sometimes they're sent out with deliberately-incorrect file extensions to get around the more stupid AV scanners.
  • Been testing ClamAV + Amavisd-new + SpamAssassin + Postfix + Courier-IMAP here.

    In the past 4 weeks, it's managed to block:
    244 virus messages
    416 spam messages
    correctly tagged 450 messages as possible spam (kill setting is low right now while I test the system).

    And that's just on my 3 e-mail accounts. I haven't put this into testing inside the department yet. :)

  • My experience with ClamAV/Qmail-scanner (Score:5, Interesting)

    by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:38PM (#8457825) Homepage

    I've had reasonably good luck with ClamAV. I've found that effectiveness tends to depend on configuration (which I'll get back to).

    Some people say that the ironclad test of an A/V app is the number of virus definitions listed. In ClamAV's case (per FreshClam's log output), there are 20372 signatures in the DB. IMO, the number of definitions doesn't really mean much. In my experience, the most important stuff to protect against are the recent outbreaks -- where mail servers are inundated with worm-laiden email. In this case, it's really a matter of how soon the definitions are updated. Generally, I tend to see definitions updated within 12-48 hours of a reported outbreak. Combine this with your update frequency to figure out your expopsure period.

    There will be an exposure period regardless of which A/V software you run. Some will have greater average periods than others. Don't rely on marketing information to figure this out. It's a bunch of crap. Real world experience is what counts here -- if you've got lots of experience with these, great. If not, try to find someone who knows their stuff who can give you a good idea for what's what with different apps. I haven't used a ton of these, so I can't give you any ironclad data.

    Your configuration will tend to be your greatest asset/worst enemy in terms of finding the best A/V setup for your particular needs. For example -- I automatically block certain types of attachments via qmail-scanner. There's no reason for them -- and they're not worth the risk. I block any attachment with the following extensions (I'm sure that this is not perfect, but whatever): .vbs, lnk, scr, wsh, hta, pif, exe, bat, com, sct, chm, cmd, crt, hlp, hta, isp, pcd, reg, shs, and js. These attachments are all allowed inside of an archive (which ClamAV scan), but I'm willing to roll the dice on exposure to those, since screwing up and opening the attachment is no longer as simple as a single mouseclick.

    Finally, I also run client-side A/V. These just aren't as reliable as server-side protection -- users always find wonky things to do with/to their computers...but I like to think of this is a last line of defense. Furthermore, users also tend to check their personal email from work. If you have the hardware to handle it, it might be worth your while to have your users forward their personal email through your service to cover your butt (or enact a policy forbidding users from checking personal email at work)...just be careful about discoverability of their personal email if it comes through your work email (IANAL).

    Overall, I'm satisfied with ClamAV/Qmail-Scanner. I'm running it on a system designed for 1000 users (in its current hardware/software configuration) -- scalable to up to about 3000 users. Currently, we're running with around 150 users...in about 2 months, we'll have our new HR/payroll system up which will allow us to add accounts for the rest of our 750 employees (long story). We'll see how good it is once I have a larger userbase to work with. However, my favorite part about ClamAV (and this is the real selling point) is the lack of per-seat fees associated with most commercial AV products. This is the same reason we chose not to use Exchange...those fees are hefty!

    • IMO, the number of definitions doesn't really mean much. In my experience, the most important stuff to protect against are the recent outbreaks -- where mail servers are inundated with worm-laiden email. In this case, it's really a matter of how soon the definitions are updated. Generally, I tend to see definitions updated within 12-48 hours of a reported outbreak. Combine this with your update frequency to figure out your expopsure period.

      But just because a virus isn't new doesn't mean that it's not sti

      • But just because a virus isn't new doesn't mean that it's not still spreading.

        Correct...but if you read my post again, you'll notice that I said that "the most important stuff to protect against are the recent outbreaks". I never said anything about completely overlooking old viruses. If you analyze a logfile from a mail server's quarantine logs, you'll find that the vast majority (~99.5%) of the worms/viruses that are picked off are from the latest outbreak. Furthermore, "latest outbreak" doesn't ne

  • We use multiple front end postfix systems with the amavis-spamassassin-clam combo to hand off to a backend Imail server (which could be any backend mail server really), servicing several thousand domains and tens of thousands of end users in those domains. With the auto-updating features setup to check in hourly, we usually have the definitions for the latest worm on the system before it really starts hitting critical mass. When the Mydoom worm (worm.sco.x) came out, the definitions on our servers were up

  • Password-encrypted Zips (Score:4, Interesting)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:54PM (#8458021)
    No server based AV solution I know of will stop the latest wave of random password zip viruses. That is because the AV program cannot scan inside the zip file. I've posted a patch to the clamav-users mailing list that marks all password-encrypted zip files as suspect and thus can be quarantined for manual extaction and scanning if desired.

    Right now I'm quarantining (with mimedefang and the patched clamav) all encrypted zip files. So far it's 100% hit rate, with no false positives. Unfortunately, ClamAV developers haven't said how they plan to deal with these password zip files.

    Overall, once I patched clamav, I was more than pleased. Over the last 2 months Clamav working through mimedefang has saved us from almost all the viruses coming into our server. Updates are daily or more and I have a cron auto-updating them on the hour.

    The beauty of having an open source AV was made clear to me today as I modified ClamAV to detect the encrypted zip files. Even though this is more of a stop-gap measure, with any other closed-source program I would have been completely at the vendor/developer's mercy.

    That said, using clamav in conjunction with other AV programs in a stack fashion would give you even more coverage if you were worried.

    • No server based AV solution I know of will stop the latest wave of random password zip viruses. That is because the AV program cannot scan inside the zip file. I've posted a patch to the clamav-users mailing list that marks all password-encrypted zip files as suspect and thus can be quarantined for manual extaction and scanning if desired.

      I just unintentionally discovered a way to block these.

      On our existing server, I have a commercial scanner, which im using with qmail-scanner. I setup qmailscanner'

    • The ClamAV developers just posted to the clamav-users list and said that the ability to optionally identify (and thus block or quarantine) encrypted zip files has officially been added to the ClamAV source, so very soon you should be able to turn on such blocking in the clam.conf file. Not sure when they will release a new snapshot with this in it. The current anonymous CVS has not quite yet got the patch.

      Tomasz Kojm, ClamAV developer, says about it:

      You have to enable this feature manually withArchiveDe

    • Vexira from Central Command scans inside zips. We've been happy with it. We did get hit by Netsky.C and Netsky.D before the definitions were released, but those are the first two that got through in a couple of years. We have approximately 7000 e-mail accounts running through it.

      Jason
    • I've posted a patch to the clamav-users mailing list that marks all password-encrypted zip files as suspect and thus can be quarantined for manual extaction and scanning if desired.

      Augh. Please don't do this. A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information in a world where not everyone uses PGP.
      • A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information...

        And a lot of people use Microsoft Outlook for the same reason ... and with the same results.

        • There are much better and more secure ways to send data around. Consider using pgp or some other encryption package. I admit that these measures can cause a lot of inconvenience for users. This is the fault of the spam and virus gangs. They have ruined it for everyone. It is time to replace smtp, no doubt about it.
      • A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information in a world where not everyone uses PGP.

        And how do you send the passwords for the zip files? Do they meet earlier and agree on the password (poor man's PKI)? If the password is in the mail itself, how is it more secure?

    • No server based AV solution I know of will stop the latest wave of random password zip viruses. That is because the AV program cannot scan inside the zip file.

      The password is in the text of the email. How difficult would it be to try all the different words in the mail as passwords? The mails have less than 50 words, so it should run pretty fast.

      • The password isn't necessarily in the text of the email. In fact, if the password _was_ in the text of the email then there really wasn't much of a point in using a password-protected archive at all. One could just as easily mail somebody the attachment, call them up on the phone, and say, "Hey, Bob, the password is 'password' on that zip I'm sending your way."

        Also, I work for one of the AV companies and I foresee that if we were to implement something like this, then eventually some obnoxious black hat

    • If it's impossible, then why don't you explain why I have dozens of lines like this in my mail log:

      Wed Mar 3 02:00:59 2004 -> /var/spool/exim4/scan/1AyLgx-0005aY-3v/1AyLgx-0005 aY-3v.eml: Worm.Bagle.F-zippwd FOUND

      Thank you, clamav!

  • Mostly works. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I use 0.65 with a patch with success. There are times when a mal-formed email will crash the daemon and then viruses can get through when the milters start timing out. One must be diligent to catch those situations. It can't be easily debugged because the offending email is long gone by the time the problem is noticed. Attempts to beg the developers for a less catastrophic failure mode (or at least a failure mode that leaves enough bits lying around to reproduce the crash for later debugging) have not r

  • From a user's POV (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr. Piddle ( 567882 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:24PM (#8458350)

    Please don't use a scanner that "quarantines" e-mails that require admin intervention to get back. One of my prior employers created such a beast for their e-mail system, and it would even quarantine e-mails I send to co-workers. The admins of course have slow turn-around times. It ended up easier to use the telephone or FTP, defeating the original convenience and usefulness of e-mail. Even further, it would quarantine totally legitimate stuff from mailing lists. Really crappy stuff.

    IMO, it is better to have suspicious e-mail diverted to a "Dangerous, Be Careful" folder with a big Skull-and-Bones air about it, so I can ignore the virus scanner altogether to get at important e-mails.

    Also, don't use Windows. Of course, you already knew that, right?

  • 90% of sites I know of spend a fortune on email virus scanning, and then block any attachment that might contain a virus. The product in question doesn't bother scanning any blocked attachment and ends up never detecting a virus.

    That was until they started putting them in zip files, which are allowed through.
  • For what it's worth (the article is quite 'old' already), F-Prot seems very well. In combination it's a very low-cost mail-virusscan sollution.

    You can use the personal version for free even on Linux (for personal use of course). With the new amavis (at least on Debian) you hardly have to configure anything, f-prot even has a Debian package available.

    The commercial workstation version works good too, but it can be slow when you have a lot of mails (probably around 10-100 per minute, haven't checked it), be
  • We attached ClamAV on several CommuniGate Pro mail servers using CGPAV to glue the two together. Apart from the current wave of password-protected-ZIP files, it seems to have been quite effective. Updates seem to be ready at least daily as far as I can see. Disclaimer: it has only been in place some 3-4 weeks now.

    Bad sides? Spartan documentation. Nothing a competent admin can't work out.

    Take this as subjective experience; ClamAV has no way to tell me it allowed a virus through. And circumstances
  • We use a Fortinet FG-60 [fortinet.com] to scan for viruses at the network layer. This has the advantage of also scanning HTTP, VPN, POP3, IMAP, SMTP and FTP traffic and strips the viruses from those streams before it hits your network!

    These devices provide VPN support as well as full firewall features. The Fortinet devices start at $500 USD and go all the way up to data center class devices costing >$40,000 USD. Very easy configuration. Worth the cost.
  • I've experienced good results using ClamAV. My setup is as follows:

    Sendmail 8.12 -> MS Exchange 2000 -> Outlook clients

    My outfit was already married to Microsoft, and the Exchange server was buckling due to being inundatad with spam. I'm also running Symantec AVF [symantec.com] on my Exchange server (Dell PE6650, Quad 1.4Ghz Xeon, 3Gb ram).

    I originally installed Linux on a Dell Dimension desktop (450Mhz PIII, 768Mb ram) using Sendmail + Spamassassin + spamass-milter + RAV [ravantivirus.com]. Spamass-milter isn't very stabl

  • ClamAV concerns (Score:3, Interesting)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdot@u i u c . e du> on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @10:44PM (#8459518) Homepage Journal
    I've been considering implementing ClamAV on our mailserver (sendmail for 800+ users), since procmail filtering is proving to be less than effective with the latest wave of viruses. But I have two concerns to resolve first:
    • How do virus definitions get into the database? Yes, they depend on community support. But what stops someone from submitting a fake virus signature that will block legitimate email?
    • There's the disturbing use of strcpy and strcat in the ClamAV source code. I don't like running software that uses such constructs as root.
    Any information on these two issues would be greatly appreciated.
  • Postfix, with RBL check, header_checks, + body checks for known spam content (even works on _known_ encrypted zips), then it hands what passes on to amavis-new, which runs _BOTH_ clamav (the clamd version, so scans are FAST), then f-prot non D version (takes longer, but is less $ vs the D version), then it gets handed to spamassassin. My clamav updates every hour via cron, the f-prot updates 2 times per day. My header_checks block lame stuff like pif, scr, etc extentions.

    Example header check: /^Content-(
  • I'm not sure if this is a good solution for 500+ usres, but at the company I work for, we use SuSE OpenExchange in combination with Antivir (www.antivir.de) . We've only got about 25-30 users, though.

    SuSE OpenExchange's default spamassassin rules are really, really good. I had to make a minor adjustment to one of the rules - and after that it has had zero false positives in addition to taking care of over 99% of the spam we receive. The last month it has blocked about 1500 spam messages to me alone - an

  • Using both Clam and Sophos.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by martin ( 1336 ) <maxsec.gmail@com> on Thursday March 04, 2004 @06:52AM (#8461577) Journal
    on my mailgateway, as they both can miss the odd one.

    I tend to find Clam updates faster, but Sophos's updates need less corrections..

    I glue them together with MailScanner (www.mailscanner.info) which also allows men to pop in SpamAssassin to the mix.

    On the desktop I use Norton's AV solution so give me a third layer of defence..

    Belt and braces.....
    • The one big problem I've found with sophos is that the scanning engine itself will only work for 3 months before it has to be updated. This alone is incredibly frustrating.
      • Depends on how you update.

        I've got a script that goes off and gets the latest engine once a month.

        ClamAV have the same issues - just not driven by timescale, but by features/bug fixes.

        For me this is a good idea as it forces the end user to spend a little time administrating the sytem IF you haven't got their Enterprise Manager tool that will do it for you...

  • I've been using Activestates "PerlMX" through a few name and company revisions -- ActiveState "PureMessage", now Sophos PureMessage.

    Anyway, it does anti-spam and anti-virus and general policy type stuff. It has been extremely reliable and has been really excellent -- great spam filtering and now with the sophos AV very up-to-date virus signatures.

    Licensed per CPU. We run about 1000 users behind a 1-cpu box and it could easily go to many more users.

    Good luck-

  • I've been using clamav for quite a few months now; it's pretty good.

    Viruses are picked up quickly enough for me, and if they're not picked up quickly enough for you, they include tools to create your own virus signatures.

  • After viewing this thread I noticed that Clam AV came up quite a bit. So I went to their website [clamav.net] and went to the news section [sourceforge.net]. From there I saw a link for PC worlds response times [google.com] articles. Here is the original [pcwelt.de] article in german. Clam AV is #5, but the AV program I use frequently is BitDefender [bitdefender.com], which is ranked #2. I use BitDefender because they have a LiveCD [bitdefender.com] that is a remastered version of Knoppix [knoppix.de] which is a Live CD based off of Debian Linux [debian.org]. BitDefenders scan engine can also scan Microsoft Windows partit

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