At 07:16 AM 8/19/2005, Chris wrote:
On Thursday 18 August 2005 11:46 pm, Matt Kettler wrote:
> At 11:20 PM 8/18/2005, you wrote:
> >Got three of these tonight with the same trojan, SA detected the other two
> > as spam, this one slipped through just a bit under the wire.
>
> Spamassassin doesn't try to detect viruses. That's what virus scanners are
> best at.
Realize that Matt, though usually there is enough of a spam signature for SA
to tag the actual message as spam, in this one case there just wasn't enough.
Well, you realize virus scanners are better. But the fact that you posted
here means you don't quite get the full meaning behind "spamassassin
doesn't try".
Often SA does wind up tagging viruses as spam. However, that's purely by
accident.
SA has the design policy of intentionally not caring about viruses. No
design effort is made trying to catch them, but no design effort is made
trying to not catch them.
The main reason is adding rules to catch or not catch viruses would wind up
diluting the scores of the spam rules. This would weaken SA's spam
detecting abilities, in order to grant it rather lame virus catching abilities.
Hence, spamassassin very much intentionally does not care at all about viruses.
Although this is a standalone box with no windows on it at all, guess I could
set one up anyway.
Setting up clamav is quick and easy, and best of all, free.
If you've got SA 3.x, there's even a clamAV plugin so you can get SA to
call clamav while it's scanning for spam.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ClamAVPlugin
I think that might offer you the least-effort path to getting rid of
viruses along with your spam.
