amavis unable to deal with encrypted files?

Hello

I have got an e-mail-gateway secured with amavisd and Sophos sweep. It
keeps infinitely requeuing mails with encrypted attachments (MS-Office and
zip). Sweep invoked manually (sweep -archive) doesn't have a problem with
an encrypted test-zipfile.

Therefore I suspect amavis itself to cause the trouble. Does somebody know
this problem? Do I really need to patch amavis
(http://www.amavis.org/contrib/) or is there another way?

Regards
Peter

--
Address-information and information about persons in this posting must not
be used for commercial purposes.

Ok... talking to myself... maybe somebody else is mildly interested too...

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 11:35:28 +0100, Peter Guhl <virustester@every-net.ch>
wrote:
> I have got an e-mail-gateway secured with amavisd and Sophos sweep. It
> keeps infinitely requeuing mails with encrypted attachments (MS-Office
> and zip). Sweep invoked manually (sweep -archive) doesn't have a problem
> with an encrypted test-zipfile.

That's because sweep knows what it has done - and reports that there have
been files it could not scan. This does, however, not seem to be clearly
reported in the return code.

> Therefore I suspect amavis itself to cause the trouble. Does somebody
> know this problem? Do I really need to patch amavis
> (http://www.amavis.org/contrib/) or is there another way?

I did write a patch myself. Sweep's error code 2 is threated, the paranoid
way, as an error stopping the process. If Amavis threats it as "OK" instead
the show goes on.

The drawback: It means loosening security. The error code 2 belongs not
only to encrypted files but to any files sweep hat do skip - or even
to some sweep-internal errors. A malfunctioning sweep will now cause
mail to be delivered instead of beeing stopped.

This is just a shor hack... does somebody know if there's already a patch
which does detect encrypted files itself and prepares the system to handle
sweep's failure differently in just that special case?

Regards
Peter

--
Address-information and information about persons in this posting must not
be used for commercial purposes.