[ale] suggestions for anti-spam filtering software.

Matt Smith msmith at risklabs.com
Mon Jul 28 18:02:22 EDT 2003


SPAM ASSASSIN!!

I can't tell you how much my life has changed since getting this up and
running.  

Basically I route all inbound email to the SA box, with a direct feed to the
exchange server being the fallback.  The SA box crunches the emails,
forwards on to the exchange box.  Spam emails get flagged in the Subject,
Header, and the body is replaced with a text report of the spam status
(original message is attached to prevent outlook auto-preview from giving
any hints to the spammers).  

You can configure rules in outlook to auto delete/sort on the subject, but I
recommend using the header..  I had some people forward me messages that
were incorrectly marked as spam so I could whitelist them but when I used
the subject to auto-delete, their messages got deleted too - so using the
header prevents that.

The only problem I had was memory.. you can't run this on a crappy P100 with
32mb of ram you have laying around.. It's all in perl, so it can be a
resource hog.  Plus the slower the box, the longer the mail queue gets as
you get lots of inbound messages.

Another disappointing thing is that with exchange there isn't a good way to
get the spam that sneaks through the SA box back to it so you can have it
learn the details of it.  Exchange doesn't include all the good header info
when forwarding, and I'm not sure that some of the macros available for
extracting the header info really do what's needed once the mail gets back
to the SA box..  Only time will tell.

There are some great how-to's available for setting up procmail/postfix to
do this.. or even sendmail/milter.. there are some missing pieces but it's
not that hard to figure out.

Good luck!

--Matt




-----Original Message-----
From: John Cole [mailto:JohnC at LGEFCU.org]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 5:44 PM
To: 'ale at ale.org'
Subject: [ale] suggestions for anti-spam filtering software.


Howdy all!

I'm currently looking for some anti-spam filtering software.  What I need is
for it to be a filtering gateway before it reaches our Exchange server (or
on our exchange server if that works as well).

I have seen 2 good options, Anti-Spam Mail Proxy
http://assp.sourceforge.net/ or Spam Assassin.  Which would ya'll suggest?
What I need is something relatively simple to understand once it is in place
and preferably with a GUI.

Pros/Cons for this type of situation would be welcome.

Thank you,
John Cole, TICSA

Help Desk Administrator
Lockheed Georgia Employees' Federal Credit Union
430 Commerce Park Drive
Marietta, GA 30060 
(770) 424-0060
(800) 541-8921 
jcole at lgefcu.org
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