Many viruses are distributed by email. It is therefore important to use an anti-virus scanner for the security of your mail server. In this article, we show you how to use ClamAV as a virus scanner for a mail server with Exim and Dovecot.
- The steps in this article require a CentOS 7 or 8 VPS with Exim and Dovecot. In this tutorial, we explain how to set up Exim and Dovecot.
- Install ClamAV in advance. Please note that ClamAV is a RAM-intensive program and will easily use +- 1GB.
- Execute the commands in this article using sudo, or as a root user.
Step 1
Connect to your VPS via SSH or the VPS console in the TransIP control panel.
Step 2
Open the Exim configuration:
nano /etc/exim/exim.conf
Step 3
Look for the piece called 'av_scanner'. Exim is automatically configured to use ClamAV but has set the wrong socket location for this. Adjust the value so that it looks like this:
av_scanner = clamd:/var/run/clamd.scan/clamd.sockThen look for 'acl_check_data' and remove the # for the lines below:
deny malware = * message = This message contains a virus ($malware_name).
Step 4
Then, add the ClamAV user to the Exim group so ClamAV can scan Exim files, and the Exim user to the virus group so it can use the ClamAV socket:
usermod -aG exim clamscan
usermod -aG virusgroup exim
Step 5
Finally, restart ClamAV and Exim to process all changes (the restart of clamd@scan may take a while):
systemctl restart clamd@scan
systemctl restart exim
This brings us to the end of this guide. In addition to a virus scanner, we highly recommend that you also add a malware scanner to your mail server, see this article.
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