A bit more on amavis

Question

A bit more on amavis

I have done a bit more digging and was wondering...

Amavis is software that is used to create a interface between Postfix, Spamassassin and ClamAV.

Looking at Server Admin does not provide an explicit way to start amavisd.
It allow me to start spamfiltering and viruschecks but not amavis

So what do I do to actually start amavisd?
Or should it simply start automatically because some other process is running?
Or is there something I'm overlooking?

Kind regards
Hans

14" Powerbook 1.5 GHz 1.5 Gb, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Sep 19, 2008 1:26 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 20, 2008 2:33 AM in response to Hans Gunnarsson

Amavis is started by Launchd

You can have a look at Launchd settings by using the "Lingon" tool.

http://tuppis.com/lingon/

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Answer 2

Sep 20, 2008 4:13 AM in response to Leif Carlsson

I used "launchctl list" to check, but I was wondering if the items listed there are items that are running or items that will be started during the next startup of the kernel.

Also if this is actually a list of items to be started do I add new items to the list by using:
launchd <daemon name>

And if this is a correct assumption...
What might be the cause for an item in the list not to be started during startup.

Kind regards
Hans

Message was edited by: Hans Gunnarsson
There was a typo...

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Answer 3

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Sep 20, 2008 7:37 AM in response to Hans Gunnarsson

Server Admin will start amavisd when you either check spam or virus filtering (or both).

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Answer 4

davidh

Level 4

1,896 points

Sep 20, 2008 9:09 AM in response to pterobyte

You have no need to try to manually start amavis(d) unless you want to attempt some slightly more advanced troubleshooting. As pterobyte explained, amavis(d) will get started automatically.

Please do not fiddle with system plists unless you are very certain of what it is you are doing.

launchctl can be used to manually load or unload launchd jobs, but *_please proceed with caution_*.
You can easily render your system unusable either partly or completely. When used carefully and cautiously, launchctl is an important, available tool.

from the man-page for launchctl:

list List all of the jobs loaded into launchd.

Using "list" will show the currently loaded launchd items, and ("list") has no bearing whatsoever on which ones will or will not load at next startup.

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Answer 5

Sep 20, 2008 10:54 AM in response to davidh

The reason I'm asking is that when amavisd is not running no mail is delivered through our external mail gateway server.

Not knowing better I was under the impression that amavisd was needed for mail being relayed.

The reason for that was that about a year ago the server stopped forwarding email from the internet to our internal server containing our client accounts. After we started amavisd manually mail started being relayed again.

If you think after all this time that the problem is not that amavis does not run, I would be happy to be corrected in my, then false, assumption regarding amavisd being needed for mail relaying.

I actually had not started any virus or spam filtering. Sofar I have just used it to filter off any unknown recipients.

Oh and if someone could please point me to some reading material besides postfix.org that discusses how the various things of the OS X server mail environment. I know what the parts are but not well enough how they interact.

Kind regards
Hans

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Answer 6

Sep 20, 2008 12:44 PM in response to Hans Gunnarsson

Sorry that was supposed to be:

Oh and if someone could please point me to some reading material besides postfix.org that discusses how the various things of the OS X server mail environment work together. I know what the parts are but not well enough how they interact.

Hans

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Answer 7

Sep 21, 2008 12:02 PM in response to Hans Gunnarsson

Hi

Amavisd interfaces with Postfix and passes mail along to Spamassassin and Clam AV for anti-virus and spam protection - You don't need it on, but it is advisable. When mail comes in on port 25 it goes through some postfix daemons and then gets relayed to amavisd via port 10024 (in mail.log it shows up as relay=localhost[127.0.0.1] or something similar). After amavisd is finished with the mail it goes back into the postfix mail queue via port 10025 and then gets delivered via postfix to cyrus and so on...

I think that the only place amavisd is called from is in the content_filter directive in Postix's main.cf (/etc/postfix/main.cf). If you hash out that line mail won't go through amavisd (and everything in the filters section of mail in SA will be greyed out).

You could have experienced problems with mail not going out because Server Admin wasn't showing the correct values or amavisd wasn't running when it should have been - I had this problem last week when a server was shut down and on restart postfix was trying to deliver to a non-existant amavisd. Usually a restart will fix this or use launchd to kickstart amavisd...

Have a look at this link, some will be relevant... http://www.akadia.com/services/postfix_amavisd.html

Other than that I think that 'the book of postfix' contains information on how postfix integrates with amavisd...

HTH

Message was edited by: James Spong

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Answer 8

Sep 22, 2008 6:45 AM in response to James Spong

Thank you for your reply, I will take a better look.

It seems that my idea of how things work was not that far off.
What I missed though was that amavisd is set up in main.cf to receive messages and distribute them to other processes.

What may have happened is that it was set manually at some point to handle messages but was then never started automatically.

At least to me this sounds as the most likely explanation.

Kind regards
Hans

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