[Mimedefang] Re: Where to call SpamAssassin

[James Ralston]

On 2003-08-10 at 22:22:24-0400 "David F. Skoll" <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> [SpamAssassin operates on the unmodified message] no matter where
> you call SpamAssassin.  Message modifications do not actually happen
> until mimedefang.pl has done its stuff and returned control back to
> the C milter code.  All of the "action_*" functions merely make a
> little note for the C back-end to do something.  They don't actually
> edit INPUTMSG in-place.

My bad; I knew that the quarantining actions were all delayed, but I
didn't realize that *all* actions were delayed.  Thanks for the
correction.

> It is better (IMO) to call SpamAssassin from filter_end, because
> then you can avoid calling it if the messages is being rejected for
> some other reason (eg a bad filename in one of the parts.)  Calling
> SpamAssassin is far and away the most expensive part of MIMEDefang,
> and avoiding it if possible is very desirable.

Hmmm.  Not that SpamAssassin is cheap, but I'd expect that invoking a
virus scanner would be more expensive (especially for archive
files)...

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA