HowTo: MailScanner 4.24 for Exim 4.24

interfasys said:

*********************************
Officially launch MailScanner
*********************************
Now that we've checked that everything is working, we can officially launch Mailscanner on the server.

# service exim stop
# service MailScanner stop
# service MailScanner start

If properly configured, Mailscanner will launch exim and scan your emails.

This works for me as far as i can tell however I should point out that you cannot kill all the exim processses from the DA control panel.

It may be that the process is being run as mail and not root:

[root@sp1 cron.hourly]# ps auxw | grep exim
mail 21892 0.0 0.0 6496 1824 ? S May26 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim -q15m -OPidFile=/var/run/exim.pid

I find I have to manually enter shell and do a ps aux | grep exim and then kill the process.

Mailscanner stops as normal:

service MailScanner stop

I've also noticed that I have zombie MailScanner process (about 5 at the moment). Not too happy about that and would like to fix this.

Jon
 
All installed and working. ;)

only thing is that after a reboot i have to do these steps:

# service exim stop
# service MailScanner stop
# service MailScanner start

Because otherwise MailScanner isn't working.

How to fix this that it will work after a reboot?
 
How to start Mailscanner at boot:
On an rpm-based system such as redhat simply type this as root:
chkconfig --level 2345 MailScanner on

Regarding Clamav - grab the latest stable build from the clamav version. The one mentioned in this "how to" is an old build and is not considered stable.

If you would rather a different AV you can try Bit Defender which is free for linux systems, including servers.

FreeBSD : There is a MailScanner version in the ports tree - use that

Non-rpm based *nix: The default install paths for MS are completely different to those for rpm based systems, but a semi-automatic installer was released recently

Spam Assassin: Make sure that spamd and spamc are NOT running. Mailscanner does NOT use them.
 
jjma said:
I've also noticed that I have zombie MailScanner process (about 5 at the moment). Not too happy about that and would like to fix this.

Jon [/B]

Found that the maximum numbert of child processes by default is 5 with mailscanner so therefore five zombie processes are created.

Jon
 
You shouldn't be getting any zombie processes unless something is wrong with your installation. By default mailscanner restarts every couple of hours to avoid memory leaks and any processes would normally be killed.
 
Jon

Sorry, but you aren't making too much sense.

If you type "top" you will get an output of processes running including the number of "zombies" if any.

MailScanner will create 5 children by default. These are not zombies.
 
blacknight said:
Jon

Sorry, but you aren't making too much sense.

If you type "top" you will get an output of processes running including the number of "zombies" if any.

MailScanner will create 5 children by default. These are not zombies.

When I initially ran the program which was friday i did a top and found that there were 5 processes that were zombies. On doing a ps auxw | grep mail I saw that all five processes were MailScanners and as you rightly pointed out, MailScanner creates 5 child processes by default. Therefore all five had turned zombie.

However on a check this morning the zombie processes had all disappeared so I guess that MailScanner restarting every two hours must have resolved the problem.

Jon
 
Help

The stp by step worked great, I have one problem.


Nobody can send or recieve any attachments anymore.

Can somebody send me the details of what file I need to change to allow zip files and etc to be emailed.
 
Have a look in MailScanner.conf and also check your maillogs. If ALL attachments are being blocked you haven't installed / configured it correctly.
 
All files blocked

I have checked my MailScanner.conf file I read threw it and checked the two files that it points to for bad file types and other than that I have no clue were to look.

Mail when sent with attachments just dissappear.

Mail works fine when somebody sends you a message with a file attachment you get this ;

This is a message from the MailScanner E-Mail Virus Protection Service
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The original e-mail attachment "Design log 1.doc"
is on the list of unacceptable attachments for this site and has been
replaced by this warning message.

If you wish to receive a copy of the original attachment, please
e-mail helpdesk and include the whole of this message
in your request. Alternatively, you can call them, with
the contents of this message to hand when you call.

At Mon May 31 22:49:11 2004 the virus scanner said:
MailScanner: A long gap in a name is often used to hide part of it (Design log 1.doc)

Note to Help Desk: Look on the wehostthemost.com MailScanner in /var/spool/MailScanner/quarantine/20040531 (message 1BUzKr-0007GC-IH).
--
Postmaster
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support.
 
Are you saying that ALL emails with attachments seem to vanish? The message you posted includes the MailScanner warning message about an invalid filename which it did block.

So, what emails with attachments are blocked? All or only some?
 
Read the message it sent you carefully. It explains why it blocked the email attachment.
The configuration options for file names and types are located in :

filename.rules.conf
filetype.rules.conf

Try a simple sanity check. Send yourself an email with a plain text attachment (.txt) and see if it arrives.
 
Check your MailScanner.conf very carefully (it is very clearly commented)
Check the file rulesets I already mentioned.
 
Try to send an email to an account that the exim is handling. When the email arrives it should be placed in the /var/spool/exim.in/input

i just wanted to know how do i check if i got a mail in that dir?

go to that directory and run "ls"?? it doesn't show anything anyway...


and add the following lines in the main part of the configuration:

are you referring this part in exim configure file?

######################################################################
# MAIN CONFIGURATION SETTINGS #
######################################################################
 
Last edited:
exim incoming process

I stopped mailscanner, and restarted exim to test MTA but mail is still being delivered so its not going into /var/spool/exim.in/input.
 
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