Since version 2.7.0 a before-queue setup is preferred, as it allows for a mail message transfer to be rejected during an SMTP session[4] with a sending client.

A disadvantage of a before-queue setup[4] is that it requires resources (CPU, memory) proportional to a current (peak) mail transfer rate, unlike an after-queue setup, where some delay is acceptable and resource usage corresponds to average mail transfer rate.

When SMTP or LMTP are used, a session can optionally be encrypted using a TLS STARTTLS (RFC 3207) extension to the protocol.

In both cases forked child processes call SpamAssassin Perl modules directly, hence their performance is similar.

Design priorities of the amavisd-new (from here on just called Amavis) are: reliability, security, adherence to standards, performance, and functionality.

This approach also covers potential unexpected host failures, crashes of the amavisd process or one of its components.

The use of program resources like memory size, file descriptors, disk usage and creation of subprocesses is controlled.

A great deal of attention is given to security aspects, required by handling potentially malicious, nonstandard or just garbled data in mail messages coming from untrusted sources.

Since December 2008 (until 2018-10-09) the only active branch was officially amavisd-new, which was being developed and maintained by Mark Martinec since March 2002.

This was agreed between the developers at the time in a private correspondence: Christian Bricart, Lars Hecking, Hilko Bengen, Rainer Link and Mark Martinec.

The project mailing list was moved from SourceForge to amavis.org in March 2011, and is hosted by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Ben Koetter.

The project web page and the main distribution site was located at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia (until the handover in 2018), where most of the development was taking place between years 2002 and 2018.

I know Ben personally, he is one of the two authors of The Book of Postfix, and uses Amavis in his professional life too, so I think the project will be in good hands.

[11]After that Patrick notified[12] the migration of the source code to a public GitLab repository and his plan for the next steps regarding the project development.

Initially the spelling of the project name was AMaViS (A Mail Virus Scanner), introduced by Christian Bricart.