How MailWasher Server integrates with your mail system

MailWasher Server uses mail conduits to integrate with your mail server.

Mail conduits

Mail conduits are small pieces of glue software written for particular MTAs (for example, qmail, or Exchange Server). They pass the message to the Mailwasher Processing Daemon, and take the actions specified by the MPD when it has finished processing the message.

Sendmail

The mail conduit-MPD interaction is implemented using the de-facto "milter" protocol, originally defined by Sendmail (and now supported by some other MTAs); this means that a mail conduit is not required for Sendmail.

qmail

The basic DJB qmail distribution offers very little configurability, offering no built-in way to integrate external systems such as MailWasher Server. Instead, the qmail conduit follows the qmail design philosophy of small, simple programs that chain together to perform the overall operation. The qmail conduit is placed infron of the standard qmail-queue, which was renamed by the installer.

It is also possible to call MailWasher Server from a .qmail delivery rules file, using a separate conduit program. However, the qmail "straight paper path" architecture provides no way for programs invoked from the .qmail to modify the message, and so unfortunately the conduit cannot add headers or perform other modifications that the MPD may give. Accordingly, this program is not considered an officially supported mail conduit, but it may be useful for those administrators who wish to test MailWasher Server out in a limited role but do not intend to configure the product to add headers.

Exchange

The Exchange conduit is a DLL that implements a COM interface that Microsoft has defined for such mail filtering systems. This DLL's COM object is passed each message as it is moved from the initial incoming message queue (where the messages are stored when during the SMTP conversation) to the message categorizer.

Note that, in contrast to the other MTAs, this means that MailWasher Server is not involved while the actual SMTP conversation is taking place.

For instructions on setting up mail conduits with your mail system, please see the installation guides for Linux, Windows and Solaris