Scanning for Windows Viruses in Linuxland?

rmmeyer asks: "I'm in the process of building an e-mail server for my company with a new twist. Since most of the clients are going to be Windows based (don't go there, I can't change 'em) and running Outlook (I know, I know...) I need to be able to scan the incoming and outgoing Emails for viruses. A quick check on Freshmeat shows fourty-nine projects related to email viruses. I intend to use Sendmail for the MTA with the milter API for scanning. There appear to be several commercial anti-virus scanners for Linux and at least one Open Source scanner. What are the community's experiences doing this? We expect to have 150 clients and potentially several thousand incoming Emails per day. Points are added for solutions that also include the capability of scanning Samba shares! =)" Ask Slashdot last touched on this issue in this article, from early March of last year, and before that in another article from October of 2000. I'm sure things have changed greatly since then.

Comments

Need for attachements?

[Gudlyf]

You might want to ask yourself what kind of attachements you're expecting to see come through the server. I personally use Postfix, which I've found to be a bit easier to configure than sendmail. Through that, I block any emails with "suspicious" attachements such as ".exe" or ".bat" (among many others). The rest are handled by the virus scanners on the individual client systems.

I'm not sure it's such a good idea not to have some kind of on-the-fly scanning for each client system, espeically if they're the type to demand the use of Outlook (I have the same situation here, and I sympathize). There's always the chance they'll grab infected files off the web as well.