[Mimedefang] MIMEDefang as a mail gateway...?

[Royce Williams]

Jason Williams wrote:

> Hello everyone.
> 
> I'm setting up a mail gateway server for our company that is going to 
> have the following:
> 
> FreeBSD 4.9
> Sendmail 8.12.11
> Latest versionof MIMEDefang
> 
> Sole purpose is to scan all incoming mails for the company, clean them, 
> then pass them off to the internal mail server.
> 
> I wanted to know if there maybe any potential problems with this 
> particular setup? Anything I should be aware of before I begin testing 
> and setting up.

We're currently running exactly the same on five boxes in a farm setup.
Not counting the mail we reject at the sendmail level, we pass something
on the order of 1M messages/day off to the back end mail servers.

We've been very happy.  Using FreeBSD's ports tree to keep current with
with p5-Mail-SpamAssassin, p5-File-Scan, clamav, and the ports version
of sendmail has made it very easy to stay current with little downtime
and low maintenance overhead.  Also, the defaults for clamav and
SpamAssassin are adjusted slightly by the porter to be reasonable for
a FreeBSD box in a more-than-low-volume environment.

I do recommend using the ports version of sendmail -- easier to upgrade
when a sendmail vulnerability is announced, and very well maintained by
the same core FreeBSD folks that integrate sendmail into the stock
install.  It's a little tricky to set up (the doc for the port tells you
what to do) but it's hands-off after the initial setup.

Note that we're not yet on MIMEDefang 2.40 -- the ports tree hasn't
absorbed it yet.  Around the time that they update the port is around
the time that I'm comfortable with most new things anyway, but YMMV.

-royce

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Royce D. Williams                                    IP Engineering, ACS
work: [first.last]@acsalaska.net                  PGP: 3FC087DB/1776A531
personal: [first]@alaska.net                 http://www.tycho.org/royce/