MailScanner with SpamAssasin?

Discuss our MailScanner install script and MailScanner itself
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Lucas
Junior Member
Posts: 10
Joined: 01 Apr 2007, 19:02

MailScanner with SpamAssasin?

Post by Lucas »

Is it worth it? Can it be done? Would it help clients be happier? Suggestions are needed. On the INSTALL.txt it suggests disabling SpamAssasin. Is MailScanner better, why or why not?

Help is greatly appreciated.

Regards
Sarah
Moderator
Posts: 934
Joined: 09 Dec 2006, 22:49

Post by Sarah »

The default installation of MailScanner as per our install script uses SpamAssassin. We recommend disabling it in cPanel because if it is enabled in cPanel and you are running MailScanner, you'll be running two copies of SA which is unnecessary and will use a lot of server resources.

We think MailScanner is better than SA alone because it does more and all the features are configurable on a per-domain basis.
Lucas
Junior Member
Posts: 10
Joined: 01 Apr 2007, 19:02

Post by Lucas »

I have installed MailScanner with ClamAV. Is there any place where I can check that they are both running correctly? Also, how would customers go about setting their permissions/rules to improve the spam catcher. Or does MailScanner do it all automatically? Is there any end-user interface? How and where does SpamAssassin work now?

Also, would you recommend 20 mailscanner processes for my Quad Core 2.4GHz and 4GB ram?

Help is appreciated.

Regards
Sarah
Moderator
Posts: 934
Joined: 09 Dec 2006, 22:49

Post by Sarah »

Tail the maillog to find out if MailScanner is working, and look at the headers of emails to see if they are being scanned. You can send a test virus (google for Eicar) to find out if clamav is working. MailScanner will automatically call spamassassin to scan messages, and you should see the SA scores in the email headers.

There is a WHM and cPanel front-end which we developed for MailScanner, currently it is only available with our MailScanner installation service.

The instructions in the MailScanner configuration file do not really take into account running anything else on the server, i.e. it is really aimed at dedicated mail servers, not web hosting servers. 20 MS processes will kill your server. We normally set the number of child processes to 3 on a cPanel server and that is almost always sufficient. If your server has enough memory (i.e. 2 GB or more) then you could increase the number of MS children higher than 3, but we would only suggest doing this if MS is not keeping up with the mail traffic on your server.
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