This help section describes the External Agents feature of ORF and the related settings. Find the External Agents configuration under the page in the navigation.
External Agents are command-line software attached to ORF to extend its email filtering repertoire by anti-virus or anti-spam capabilities. Agents are typically third-party products, but Vamsoft also releases agents occasionally against specific spam outbreaks.
Using the command line scanner of an anti-virus product as an External Agent opposed to using the built-in email filtering feature of the anti-virus is discouraged. The latter usually offers a wider range of options than External Agents (e.g., disinfecting the email attachment) and have a smaller footprint than starting the command line scanner each time an email arrives.
ORF creates a temporary copy of the incoming email in the directory you specified as Path for temporary email files (see below), then it calls the command line agent executable to scan this temporary file with the specified parameters. When the executable finished scanning the email, it returns the scan result to ORF as an exit code. ORF will perform the action assigned to the exit code returned on the original email and deletes the temporary copy.
You can enable or disable the External Agent test by clicking the ON / OFF button on top of the page, or on the page.
Select an existing path where the email files will be placed temporarily while they are being scanned. Make sure that this path is excluded from virus checking, otherwise you may get errors when ORF tries to write a copy of a virus-infected email to the path.
Set the checkbox of the Agent that you want to activate or clear the checkbox to de-activate. Before you start using an Agent, it is recommended to read its description and personalize its properties to your system (e.g., paths).
The agent on the top of the list is checked first when filtering. Set the check order by selecting the agent and moving it using the Move Up and Move Down buttons. Alternatively, you can move the agent by using drag & drop.
Click the New button to add a new agent definition to the list. To modify an existing agent definition, click Modify. Agents can be deleted using the Delete button or the Delete key.
Right-click on the list and select "Import definitions..." or "Export definitions..." Alternatively, you can do this from the menu, select or . See more on this below.
See the Agent Properties section.
Any External Agent can be configured to tag emails on hit instead of dropping them. This comes in handy if you want to redirect blacklisted emails to the Junk folder of users for further review using the SCL evaluation of Exchange. For more information, please read our article.
We offer a wide range of agent definitions on our website.
ORF does not write the email back to the SMTP transport when the agent processing is finished, i.e., even if you configure your anti-virus agent to disinfect the email, the email being tested will not be disinfected.
The import and export format for agent definitions is XML (see the List Import and Export Formats section).