Quarantining

Since iRedMail-0.7.0, quarantining related settings in Amavisd are configured by iRedMail but disabled by default, you can easily enable quarantining with this tutorial.

With below steps, Virus/Spam/Banned emails will be quarantined into SQL database. You can then manage quarantined emails with iRedAdmin-Pro.

Quarantining spam, virus, banned and bad header messages

Edit Amavisd config file, find below settings and update them. If it doesn't exist, please add them.

# Part of file: /etc/amavisd/amavisd.conf

# Change values of below parameters to D_DISCARD.
# Detected spams/virus/banned messages will not be delivered to user's mailbox.
$final_virus_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_spam_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_banned_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_bad_header_destiny = D_DISCARD;

# Quarantine SPAM into SQL server.
$spam_quarantine_to = 'spam-quarantine';
$spam_quarantine_method = 'sql:';

# Quarantine VIRUS into SQL server.
$virus_quarantine_to = 'virus-quarantine';
$virus_quarantine_method = 'sql:';

# Quarantine BANNED message into SQL server.
$banned_quarantine_to = 'banned-quarantine';
$banned_files_quarantine_method = 'sql:';

# Quarantine Bad Header message into SQL server.
$bad_header_quarantine_method = 'sql:';
$bad_header_quarantine_to = 'bad-header-quarantine';

Also, make sure you have below lines configured in same config file:

# For MySQL/MariaDB/OpenLDAP backends
@storage_sql_dsn = (
    ['DBI:mysql:database=amavisd;host=127.0.0.1;port=3306', 'amavisd', 'password'],
);

# For PostgreSQL
#@storage_sql_dsn = (
#    ['DBI:Pg:database=amavisd;host=127.0.0.1;port=5432', 'amavisd', 'password'],
#);

Restarting amavisd service is required.

Configure iRedAdmin-Pro to manage quarantined mails

Update iRedAdmin-Pro config file, make sure you have correct settings for Amavisd:

# File: settings.py

amavisd_db_host = '127.0.0.1'
amavisd_db_port = 3306
amavisd_db_name = 'amavisd'
amavisd_db_user = 'amavisd'
amavisd_db_password = 'password'

# Log basic info of inbound/outbound, no mail body stored.
amavisd_enable_logging = True

# Quarantining management
amavisd_enable_quarantine = True
amavisd_quarantine_port = 9998

# Per-recipient policy lookup
amavisd_enable_policy_lookup = True

Restarting Apache web server or uwsgi service (if you're running Nginx as web server) is required.

You can now login to iRedAdmin-Pro, and manage quarantined messages via menu System -> Quarantined Mails. Choose action in drop-down menu list to release or delete them.

Screenshots attached at the bottom.

Notify users about quarantined mails

iRedAdmin-Pro ships script tools/notify_quarantined_recipients.py to notify users which have email quarantined in SQL database.

Default notification email contains basic info of each quarantined email:

The notification email message is read from (HTML) template file tools/notify_quarantined_recipients.html, if you want to modify it, please copy it to tools/notify_quarantined_recipients.html.custom then modify it. During upgrading iRedAdmin-Pro, this custom file will be copied to new iRedAdmin-Pro directory, so you won't lose your customization.

Several parameters are required by this script in iRedAdmin-Pro config file:

# SMTP server address, port, username, password used to send notification mail.
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_SERVER = 'localhost'
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_PORT = 587
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_STARTTLS = True
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_USER = 'no-reply@localhost.local'
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_PASSWORD = ''
NOTIFICATION_SMTP_DEBUG_LEVEL = 0

# URL of your iRedAdmin-Pro login page which will be shown in notification
# email, so that user can login to manage quarantined emails.
# Sample: 'https://your_server.com/iredadmin/'
#
# Note: mail domain must have self-service enabled, otherwise normal
#       mail user cannot login to iRedAdmin-Pro for self-service.
NOTIFICATION_URL_SELF_SERVICE = 'https://[your_server]/iredadmin/'

# Subject of notification email. Available placeholders:
#   - %(total)d -- number of quarantined mails in total
NOTIFICATION_QUARANTINE_MAIL_SUBJECT = '[Attention] You have %(total)d emails quarantined and not delivered to mailbox'

To notify user periodly, please add a cron job for root user to run tools/notify_quarantined_recipients.py. For example, every 6 hours ('6 hours' is just an example, the period is totally up to you):

1 */6 * * * /usr/bin/python /var/www/iredadmin/tools/notify_quarantined_recipients.py --force-all >/dev/null

Don't forget to use the correct path to notify_quarantined_recipients.py on your server.

You can also run this script manually to notify users. for example, on RHEL/CentOS:

cd /var/www/iredadmin/tools/
python notify_quarantined_recipients.py --force-all

notify_quarantined_recipients.py supports few arguments:

Argument Comment
--force-all Send notification to all users which have email quarantined
--force-all-time Notify users for their all quarantined emails instead of just new ones since last notification.
--notify-backupmx Send notification to all recipients under backup mx domain

Quarantine clean emails

Note: If you just want to quarantine clean emails sent from/to certain local user, please refer to this document instead: Quarantine clean emails sent from/to certain local user

If you want to quarantine clean emails into SQL database for further approval or whatever reason, please follow below steps:

$clean_quarantine_method = 'sql:';
$clean_quarantine_to = 'clean-quarantine';

$policy_bank{'ORIGINATING'} = {
    ...
    clean_quarantine_method => 'sql:',
    final_destiny_by_ccat => {CC_CLEAN, D_DISCARD},
}

Now all clean emails sent by your mail users will be quarantined into SQL database.

Screenshots

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