Major OpenEFA Updates: Quarantine System & Antivirus Integration

Posted on October 14, 2025 | By Scott Barbour

Feature Release v1.1.0 Quarantine Antivirus

🎉 Two Major Features Launched!

OpenEFA v1.1.0 brings email quarantine management and ClamAV antivirus scanning, achieving 95% feature parity with traditional email security appliances.


Update now:

curl -sSL http://install.openefa.com/install.sh | sudo bash

We're excited to announce two major feature additions to OpenEFA that bring us even closer to complete feature parity with traditional email security appliances like MailGuard and EFA.

🔒 Email Quarantine System

OpenEFA now includes a complete email quarantine management system, giving administrators and users full control over suspicious emails before they reach inboxes.

Key Features

🎯 Smart Filtering
  • Spam Filter: Emails with score ≥ 5.0
  • Clean Filter: Scores < 3.0
  • Status Tracking: Held/Released/Deleted
⚡ User Actions
  • Release: Send to recipient
  • Not Spam: Release + whitelist
  • Delete: Remove + block similar
  • View Headers: Full inspection

Database Architecture

The quarantine system uses a robust database design with four dedicated tables:

  • email_quarantine - Stores full email content and metadata
  • quarantine_actions_log - Audit trail of all user actions
  • quarantine_statistics - Performance metrics and trends
  • quarantine_config - Retention and policy settings
📊 Admin Features: Bulk operations, domain-scoped access for multi-tenant deployments, 30-day statistics, and complete audit logging.

🦠 ClamAV Antivirus Integration

OpenEFA now includes complete antivirus scanning powered by ClamAV, the industry-standard open-source antivirus engine.

What This Means

Real-time Attachment Scanning
  • Every email attachment is scanned before delivery
  • Detection of viruses, trojans, malware, and ransomware
  • EICAR test virus confirmed working in production
  • Automatic virus definition updates (multiple times daily)

Performance

< 500ms

Scan time per attachment

~1.4GB

Memory footprint

225MB

Virus signature database

Integration Details

The antivirus scanner module integrates seamlessly with the existing email processing pipeline:

  1. Email arrives at OpenEFA
  2. SpaCy AI analysis (spam, phishing, BEC detection)
  3. ClamAV scans all attachments
  4. Combined score sent to SpamAssassin
  5. Email delivered or quarantined
⚠️ Virus Detection Scoring:
Virus detected: +50 spam score (immediate block) | Scan error: +5 spam score | Clean: No penalty

🔐 Additional Improvements

Admin-Only Blocking Rules

Blocking rules are now restricted to administrators only, preventing accidental blocks by domain users.

  • Client Users: View-only access with "View Only" badges
  • Admin Users: Full control - add, delete, toggle rules across all domains
  • Statistics showing blocked email counts (last 30 days)

Enhanced Password Reset

Password reset messages in SpacyWeb now include:

  • Copy-to-clipboard button for instant password copying
  • Extended 30-second visibility (vs 5 seconds for regular messages)
  • Fallback clipboard support for HTTP and older browsers

Production Data Sanitization

The installer has been completely sanitized for public distribution:

  • Removed hardcoded production domain lists (15+ domains)
  • Removed test user quick-fill buttons
  • Made all configurations dynamic from database
  • Genericized regex patterns for any domain

📊 Feature Parity Progress

With these updates, OpenEFA now has ~95% feature parity with traditional Email Filter Appliances (EFA/MailGuard).

✅ Complete Features
  • AI-based spam/phishing detection
  • Antivirus scanning (ClamAV)
  • Email quarantine management
  • Authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC)
  • BEC and typosquatting detection
  • PDF phishing analysis (TOAD)
  • Multi-tenant web interface
  • Domain-scoped access control
  • Behavioral anomaly detection
  • RBL integration
  • Conversation learning system
  • ARC email forwarding support
⏳ Remaining Gaps (v1.2.0 roadmap):
End-user self-service portal | Enhanced reporting and analytics | Let's Encrypt SSL automation

🚀 Deployment

Fresh Installation

curl -sSL http://install.openefa.com/install.sh | sudo bash

System Requirements:

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or 22.04 LTS
  • 2+ GB RAM (4GB recommended with ClamAV)
  • 20+ GB disk space
  • Root access

Updating Existing Installations

The update script automatically handles database migrations and service restarts:

curl -sSL http://install.openefa.com/install.sh | sudo bash
🛡️ Safe Updates: Automatic backups before changes, configuration preservation, and rollback capability if validation fails.

📈 Performance Impact

Feature Performance Impact Notes
Quarantine System Negligible Indexed queries, automatic cleanup
ClamAV Scanning ~500ms per email Only for emails with attachments
Memory Usage +1.4GB ClamAV daemon + freshclam

Production Metrics

Based on live deployments processing thousands of emails daily:

  • Spam detection: 95%+ accuracy
  • False positives: < 0.1%
  • Quarantine usage: ~2-5% of total email volume
  • Virus detection: 100% EICAR test pass rate

🐛 Bug Fixes in v1.1.0

  • Fixed Postfix configuration chmod error during installation
  • Fixed admin users not receiving access to all configured domains
  • Added iputils-ping for Ubuntu Server minimal installations
  • Fixed quarantine permission checks to use recipient domains
  • Fixed duplicate flash message display in SpacyWeb

🎯 What's Next

v1.2.0 Roadmap (Q4 2025)

  • Email digest notifications (daily/weekly quarantine summaries)
  • Enhanced analytics dashboard
  • PDF/attachment content analysis improvements
  • Let's Encrypt SSL automation
  • Multi-server clustering support

v1.3.0 Vision (Q1 2026)

  • Active-Active high availability
  • Shared database clustering (Galera)
  • Geographic distribution support
  • Advanced threat intelligence feeds

🙏 Community

OpenEFA is open source (GPL-3.0) and community-driven. We welcome:

💬 Get Involved

Special thanks to all early adopters who provided feedback on the quarantine interface and helped test the ClamAV integration!

Ready to Upgrade?

Run the update script today and get quarantine management + antivirus protection in under 5 minutes:

curl -sSL http://install.openefa.com/install.sh | sudo bash