This whole week has been vacation for me, a bit of a sabbatical, really. Went to Disneyland for three days in the middle of it, so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I have made some good progress on somethings.
Today's progress has been on getting email migrated from Chiba (old server) to Puffer (new server.) I've successfully gotten ClamAV plugged into email received on SMTP, and am working on SpamAssassin, but my eyes are starting to cross so I'm going to bed. Yes, it's before midnight. Yes, I'm getting old.
But before I go to bed, I have a question for anyone reading this who understands such things: What is the benefit of using Milters with Postfix as opposed to just doing standard SMTP style before-queue content filtering?
If I'm reading it correctly, Postfix supports Milter so they can talk to off-the-shelf plug-ins that support the Sendmail Milter protocol. However, the plugins I'm wanting to install (SpamAssassin and ClamAV for starters, possibly others) seem to only support Milters using a additional glue-layer package that talks Milters on one side and the normal SMTP mechanism on the other.
If this is correct, then it seems that using Milters with these particular plugins is just MORE overhead. The question is, do I get any additional benefit by using Milters?
If not, I'm thinking of simplifying things and just ripping the Milter layer out and either doing pre-queue filtering, or just going lazy and doing post-queue filtering.
Anyone have any thoughts? Feel free to hit me up on GTalk, AIM, Yahoo and/or Twitter as @SmittyHalibut, or throw a comment here. Thanks for your help.