MailScanner is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

security system for use on

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

email gateways and was first released in 2001. It protects against

viruses A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Viruses are found in almo ...

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

, malware, and phishing. It is distributed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. The original author, Julian Field, won the 2004 Open Source Award from UKUUG for the product. Worldwide, the software is estimated to be process over eighty billion emails per month, with millions of downloads. ISPs and

mobile telephone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This radio ...

networks are included in this list of users. More recently, anti-

phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...

measures have been introduced. The software spots attempts at obfuscating URLs (for example, to lure the user into thinking they are signing into their bank, when in reality they are using an impostor web site) and modifies the email with a suitable warning. As of January 2014 the project is sponsored by the lead developer Jerry Benton who is the founder of Mailborder Systems. As of January 2018 the primary developer is Shawn Iverson of the eFa Project. The project's other major contributor is Mark Sapiro of the GNU Mailman project.

Technology

MailScanner is implemented in around 50,000 lines of

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

. It links with other software packages in order to fulfill its duties: * Email server ( MTA) (e.g.

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of t ...

, postfix). *

Anti-virus Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name ...

software (e.g.

ClamAV ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus) is a free software, cross-platform antimalware toolkit able to detect many types of malware, including viruses. It was developed for Unix and has third party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, OpenVMS, ...

– over twenty five different products are supported). * Anti-spam software (

SpamAssassin Apache SpamAssassin is a computer program used for e-mail spam filtering. It uses a variety of spam-detection techniques, including DNS and fuzzy checksum techniques, Bayesian filtering, external programs, blacklists and online databases. It ...

). As with any complex software platform, performance results can vary wildly depending on a wide variety of factors. In 2009 evidence suggested that a quad

Xeon Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...

PC with 2 GB of RAM and 15 kRPM

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

disks can process something in the area of 2.2 million messages per day. This number would be dwarfed by modern hardware.

References

External links

MailScanner home page

MailScanner Wiki (documentation website)

OSS Watch - MailScanner: a case study in sustainability

Julian Field's home page
Free email software Anti-spam Free software programmed in Perl {{Unix-stub