Amavisd-new Notes

• See our paper, [http://nakedape.cc/products/packages/maildefender/paper Defending E-mail Users from Spam and Viruses]

Disable SpamAssassin

Should you want to disable SpamAssassin, uncomment the line in amavisd.conf:

@bypass_spam_checks_acl  = qw( . );  # uncomment to DISABLE anti-spam code

Virus Notifications

Mark posted a recipe for a $viruses_that_fake_sender_re that only sends notifications for the few viruses that don’t fake the sending address.

$viruses_that_fake_sender_re = new_RE(
    qr'@mm',  # mass mailing viruses as labeled by f-prot
    [qr'^(EICAR\.COM|Joke\.|Junk\.)'i     => 0],
    [qr'^(WM97|OF97|W95/CIH-|JS/Fort)'i   => 0],
    [qr/.*/ => 1],   # true by default!
);

Nano-HOWTO for Regular Expressions

Some comments about regular expressions I wrote up while explaining to a customer how to modify the $banned_filename_re.

$banned_filename_re = new_RE(
  qr'\.[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]{0,3}\.(vbs|pif|scr|bat|com|exe|dll)$'i, # double extension
  qr'.\.(ade|adp|bas|bat|chm|cmd|com|cpl|crt|exe|hlp|hta|inf|ins|isp|js|
         jse|lnk|mdb|mde|msc|msi|msp|mst|pcd|pif|reg|scr|sct|shs|shb|vb|
         vbe|vbs|wsc|wsf|wsh)$'ix,                  # banned extension - long
  qr'^\.(exe|lha|tnef)$'i,                      # banned file(1) types
  qr'^application/x-msdownload$'i,                  # banned MIME types
  qr'^message/partial$'i, qr'^message/external-body$'i, # rfc2046
);

• Each line is a Perl quoted regular expression, delimited by qr' and ending with '.
• The list of patterns are a logical OR–if any line matches, the whole thing matches.
• Regular expressions are a pattern-matching mini-language, like DOS or UNIX wildcards but more powerful.
• The i and x at the end of some of the patterns are flags; the i makes the match case-insensitive and the x lets you put in whitespace that’s not matched.

• A group of things to match any one of is done with:

  (foo|bar|baz)
  

• If you want to add ‘bat’ to the group to match, it would be something like this, although you don’t have to put it at the end:

  (foo|bar|baz|bat)
  

• A dot . matches any single character; to match only a dot, escape it with a backslash: \..

• A caret ^ anchors the pattern at the beginning and a dollar-sign $ anchors it at the end.

• Brackets [ and ] indicate a character class, which may be a range such as [A-Z] or a list of characters such as [xyz]. A character class matches one character without a count qualification.

• Braces { and } indicate a count of the previous pattern to match; it can be a comma-delimited range such as {0,3} or a single number {2}. For example, the following matches 1 or 2 combinations of A or B:

  [AB]{1,2}