Feed Your Virus Worries to a Clam

Configuring Postfix To Use Amavisd-new

Last week, we looked at how to set up SpamAssassin with Postfix, as part of a lean, mean, spam-killing gateway machine. This week we'll add an anti-virus scanner to our bubbling brew.

Prerequisites: a nice Postfix server already running and working smoothly. Then add Amavisd-new and ClamAV, and you're in business.

You need Amavisd-new, because Postfix does not directly support anti-virus scanners. Amavisd-new acts as a SMTP proxy: Postfix hands incoming mail to Amavisd-new. Amavisd-new then stuffs it through ClamAV, then hands off whatever messages remain after processing to Postfix for final delivery. Amavisd-new supports several AV scanners, you don't have to use ClamAV. I just like the name. Plus it's GPL (define) , and it works very well.

Set up Postfix and Amavisd-new by following the directions in last week's article under Configuring Postfix To Use Amavisd-new.