Sendmail is one of the most popular SMTP MTAs. It is very
configurable through some defines, features and rulesets. However for
quite a long time for content analysis/messages modifications of SMTP
messages and complex needs (spam & attachment filtering, custom
logging, disclaimer addition, virus scanning ....) you had to either
:
call some external programs (through pipes in aliases or special
mailers : perl script, procmail, maildrop, ....). Such solution could
handle only local delivery or messages to local addresses..
or use sendmail in queuing mode and parse the qf and df files with
some program triggered on a regular basis (MailScanner approach)
or use some special forwarding scheme : sandwitch architecture with
several sendmail's instances : amavisd-new dual-sendmail set-up &
first commercial antivirus approach)
or alter sendmail's source code (use of the check_compat function) to
add some extensions requiring recompiling sendmail. It was not
dynamic and smooth. Furthermore adjustments for each new sendmail
releases could be needed (sendmail's internal code change)..
Some better and easier solutions were really needed.
In order to make it easy to write some Sendmail filters, the Sendmail
team has developed some API called Milter (Mail Filtering API) which
was first implemented in versions on 8.10.x, then improved in 8.11.x
as some FFR (For Future Release) code and officially supported since
8.12.x.
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* Origin: [adminz] tech, security, support (192.168.0.2)
generated by msg2page 0.06 on Jul 21, 2006 at 19:04:24
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