[Mimedefang] fetchmail and mimedefang for antivirus

Keli'i Martin werureo at bellsouth.net
Wed Sep 24 01:32:14 EDT 2003


    I have been having a difficult time getting something to work.  I 
recently found a posting by doing a Google search, but I'm needing more 
help trying to figure this out.  The posting is here: 
http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedefang/2002-June/001564.html  
It's over a year old, which is why I am re-posting it.

    Basically, my situation is the same.  I have fetchmail set up to 
download email from my ISP to my Red Hat Linux machine.  On that 
machine, I have mimedefang and spamassassin set up.  Recently, with the 
latest Microsoft hoax email virus going around, I've been getting hit 
hard.  I was getting email sent to my root account from 
FETCHMAIL-DAEMON at localhost.localdomain, saying that there was a General 
SMTP/ESMTP error.

    From what I've read, mimedefang is rejecting these emails and, as a 
result, fetchmail cannot delete the email from the server because it 
couldn't finish its job.  This is exactly what is happening with me.  
There were about 99 infected emails sitting on my ISP's server.  I guess 
fetchmail was constantly trying to download those emails, and each time 
it got rejected by mimedefang, it would send an email to root from 
FETCHMAIL-DAEMON telling me so.  I got over 20,000 of these e-mails in 
the span of three days.

    Anyway, David F. Skoll, the author of the above post, recommended 
changing the MIMEdefang filter to call action_discard() instead of 
action_bounce().  My question is this:  where exactly do I make this 
change in the filter?  I found a place in the filter that called 
action_bounce and changed that to action_discard, but then none of my 
email was getting downloaded.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I have no idea how to fix 
this.

Keli'i Martin
werureo at bellsouth dot net






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