[Mimedefang] MIMEDefang HOWTO

[Kris Deugau]

Lisa Casey wrote:
> I'm planning to follow the MIMEDefang HOWTO at
> http://www.rudolphtire.com/mimedefang-howto/#ss1.2
> to get anti-spam/virus protection on my Redhat 7.2 server. It is currently
> an 8.11 version of
> Sendmail so my first step will be to upgrade that. (Actually I have already
> followed the procedure up to creating the devtools/Site/site.config.m4
> file).

Unless your 8.11.6 was a custom compile, I *strongly* recommend you just
rebuild the src.rpm from 8.0 (along with any other necessary packages)
instead of doing it yourself.  You'll save yourself a lot of time and
testing effort.

> I'm concerned about one thing though. I'm planning to do this on a "live"
> server. Is there any point in this that I could disrupt  my customers
> e-mail? Suppose I only had time today to upgrade Sendmail with the email
> filter interface, but had to leave doing the rest of this until another day.
> Will there be a problem in that I am now running Sendmail 8.12.6 with a
> filter interface but no filters yet?

Nope.  So long as you don't actually have any milter calls defined in
your sendmail.mc/cf, sendmail will operate as if it didn't have the
milter interface enabled.

One useful note to keep things moving smoothly when you do the update
(however you do it), change the RedHat-provided initscript:

On the line that begins
	daemon /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd \
change it to 
	daemon /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -qp1m \

That extra command-line option allows sendmail to process certain types
of locally-generated mail (ie MIMEDefang notifications, a lot of
webmail, postmaster notifications, users sending mail from a shell,
etc.) to get processed (quickly?  at all?  I've forgotten).

As a few other people have noted, try it on a test box FIRST.  If
nothing else, it will let you try the upgrade over and over to find out
what's the best order to do things in without affecting regular service.

-kgd
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