I thought it would be a good idea to install ClamAV and Spamassasin into my mail retrieval process no that I have cron pulling my emails from all my ISP mail accounts to my dev server once a day.
Fortunately I decided to implement the changes to the configs for mail to be retrieved from my local servers first. I need a lot more web trawling yet; 10 emails retrieved, zero arrived in the inbox.
It seems to work, getmail displays the retriving message X of Y and the number X goes up until it reaches Y as expected, ClamAV is being invoked as the log reports the ‘virus db is out of date’ for each mail message so it is running against each mail message. But where the heck does it put them ?, they are not appearing in my inbox !.
For now I have reverted all configs to not use ClamAv except the one that retrives the emails cron generates on my desktop server; the simple theory behing that is I don’t really care if those emails get lost, and I probably will have read them anyway from the command line (as you do when you get a ‘new mail’ message pop up on the command line; and I’m always on the command line, GUIs are too hard).
However, to complicate it, getmail was not retrieving any emails from my desktop system… looks like on my desktop I never actually went through my own document (the draft tutorial in the tutorials section) to reconfigure my desktop to use the Maildir format instead of the mbox format; although that should not have made a difference as I thought both sendmail and dovecot defaulted to mbox (the confusing issue was mutt was still mbox so it could see the mail, but getmail couldn’t get any mail from that server, maybe dovecot does default to Maildir not mbox ???), anyway they are ALL using explicitly Maildir now… and mutt can no longer see the emails that are there so its using the new directories; sigh.
User error, bother.
Now my desktop is configured the same as the rest of my machines I can proceed with using that as the test bed in my hunt for where the mail is actually going.
Who knows, it may be being validly dropped by spamassassin as they are coming from servers (ie: mark@osprey, mark@falcon etc, rather than mark@xxx.xxx.xxx.com)…, no wait, the spamassain drop is done before ClamAV is invoked and ClamAV was being invoked for each message so it got that far [thoughts for myself to refer back to here]. I must have configured ClamAV wrong then, but I’m sure I told it not to delete anything but to just put anything it didn’t like into a seperate folder, which is empty. Can I say bother again, where are they going. Unfortunately I have a lot of disk on my dev server now, a find / -mtime -1 takes about 3hrs [if nothing else is running] so while it is the simplest solution (assuming they are not being discarded in which case find would not find anything) I am going to explore down all other paths first.
It is a learning excercise. I am learning (and inventing) new phrases that should not be used in front of children; and all learning is good isn’t it :-).
