The Qmail virus scanner (QScan) is a mail filter for Qmail that scans incoming messages using the Sophos Antivirus engine, immediately rejecting infected content.

It is designed to be minimalistic, yet extremely fast and secure, and uses multiple pipes instead of the traditional temporary files and privilege separation. It works with non-native versions of the virus scanner like under OpenBSD with Linux or FreeBSD emulation.


You must create a temporary directory to extract MIME attachments, and replace Qmails original qmail-queue program with Qscan. Quick way to achieve this for the impatients :

mkdir /var/qmail/qscan
chmod 700 /var/qmail/qscan
chown qmaild:qmail /var/qmail/qscan
ln /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue-old

Now, lets compile and install Qscan :

./configure --help

./configure [your beloved flags]

make install-strip

The last step is to replace the original qmail-queue program with our filter :

rm /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
ln -s /usr/local/sbin/qscan /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue

Depending on your local configuration, it may be needed or not, but start with doing it :

chown qmaild:qmail /usr/local/sbin/qscan
chmod 6711 /usr/local/sbin/qscan

After testing, if everythings ok for you, remove the setuid bit :

chown 0:0 /usr/local/sbin/qscan
chmod 711 /usr/local/sbin/qscan