amavisd-new is a high-performance and reliable interface between mailer (MTA) and one or more content checkers: virus scanners, and/or Mail::SpamAssassin Perl module. amavisd-new is written in Perl, ensuring high portability, reliability and maintainability. It talks to MTA via (E)SMTP or LMTP protocols, or by using helper programs. No timing gaps exist in the design, which could cause a mail loss.
It is normally positioned at or near a central mailer, not necessarily where users’ mailboxes and final delivery takes place. If looking for a per-user and low-message-rate solution to be placed at the final stage of mail delivery (e.g. called from procmail or in place of a local delivery agent), there may be other solutions more appropriate.
When calling of Mail::SpamAssassin (SA) is enabled, it calls SA only once per message regardless of the number of recipients, and tries very hard to correctly honour per-recipient preferences, such as pass/reject, check/nocheck, spam levels, and inserting spam-related mail header fields.
amavisd-new benefits from the use of Perl module Net::Server, which offers a fast pre-forked multichild process control. amavisd-new provides rfc2821-compliant SMTP server, rfc2033-compliant LMTP server, SMTP client, and generates rfc3462/rfc3464-compliant (ex rfc1892/rfc1894) (non-)delivery status notifications.
This makes it suitable for mail anti-virus and/or anti-spam checking on a busy mail gateways that care for reliability and standards compliance.
amavisd-new grew out of amavisd(-snapshot) (which in turn is a daemonized version of amavis-perl), but through three years of development turned into a separate product, hardly resembling its origin. The code is several times the size of its predecessor, yet faster in throughput, richer in features, compliant to standards, includes optional support for spam detection, and makes virus scanning optional and easier to adjust/extend. Compatibility with helper programs from amavisd(-snapshot) is retained.
All modifications since the original amavisd done by Mark Martinec, with contribution of ideas, patches and reports from the amavis-user mailing list community and individuals.
What’s New in This Release:
· Regular expressions were simplified to avoid Perl crashing on very long degenerated addresses in a header.
· Parsing of header field names is stricter to avoid duplicating a Subject header field under rare circumstances.
· Policy bank name from AM.PDP protocol is now untainted to avoid SQL errors.
· Handling of status EAGAIN in SMTP client code was improved.
· The number of arguments to a file(1) utility now obeys a POSIX program argument space limit.
· Sprintf format for conversion of 64-bit values was fixed.
· AV entries for F-PROT fpscan and fpscand were added, and a BitDefender bdscan entry was updated.
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