On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 09:44:29AM -0400, Louis Bohm wrote: > I will take a look at mimedefang in a bit. Right now I am just trying to > understand how all this works together. Sadly I have not seen any docs > that really describe the process and the function of all the pieces.
Well, with milter the short version is like this:
- sendmail receives SMTP commands (MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, etc.)
- sendmail eventually received a DATA portion containing the message
- sendmail, through the milter API, calls out to external processes to
do work on the message
- results come back to sendmail: typically sendmail is told whether to
accept the message or not, and the message may or may not be modified
upon return.
- sendmail then either sends the appropriate rejection message to the
sending server, or it accepts the mail and continues the message on
the path to delivery.
milter was designed for things like virus scanners and the like, although
it's actually more flexible than that.
SpamAssassin just filters messages. A message comes in, it gets scanned
and marked up with information specifying how "spammy" the message is,
and that is the spit back out. For SA to be used with sendmail, qmail,
postfix, etc, there needs to be some interface between the MTA and
the filter. qmail has qmail-scanner, postfix has filtering support
built-in I believe, and sendmail has milter, of which there are a few
which support spamassassin currently (you can write your own, but...)
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