Comments on How To Build A Spam Filtering Mail Gateway

When i did the mailscanner install, it did not place any scripts in the init.d directory, nor could i find any in the /opt/MailScanner dirs. the chkconfig command listed above yielded nothing whatsoever. I looked at the MailScanner page, but some of it's pages were missing on the site, and i couldn't find any mention of the init scripts required.

Excelent document. I was looking for this kind of document the last week and finally I've found it. Nice help for a big problem.

Omar Rojas García

[email protected]

If you like this, but want something more robust and easier to setup, take a look at www.piratefish.org

It uses the same elements, but it's mostly web managed through webmin.

I can understand your choice or ClamAV as virus scanner, because it is totally free and open source, but I have concerns about its ability to keep out the newest viruses (and that is the most important job for an AV program.

I found BitDefender offers free use (for all) on Linux systems as well as F-Prot and Antivir (for Linux home use only). They are all easy to install and are as good as each other and (sorry to say) better than clamAV in catching new viruses.

One could also use any commercial AV with unix support. I found Sophos works really well.

They all work well and are updated automatically (with little tweaking) by MailScanner.

I use ClamAV, Trend and Norton on my servers and I've found ClamAV is updated just as fast and in many cases faster then the commercial counterparts. Independant studies also support this, check out the ClamAV site for more info. Still you should never rely on this type of email gateway alone to prevent virus outbreaks. You need antivirus on all servers and workstations if you want to be safe.

Careful, those antivirus programs are not free for commercial or for business environment use. Thus, you should not use them an a email gateway which is used in (or for) companies, in most cases. ClamAV is the only free and reliable antivirus - yet.

It was said: "Its a good idea to test the server now. Send a message to the remote server and see if it goes thru. It should, and then you can move to installing SpamAssassin." It didn't go thru. What now?

Please go to the HowtoForge forums and post your problem there including any error messages you have got.

https://www.howtoforge.com/forums

You will find there many users that installed the howtos already and also many of the howto authors are answering support questions there too.

Section II b. should be "mynetworks_style" not "mynetwork_style"

If you want a nice anti-spam setup with a how-to walkthrough, giving you a system integrated with a webmin-based administrative interface, that includes setup help for Bayesian filtering using spamassassin, please take a look at http://piratefish.blogspot.com

Hi.

MailScanner uses ways to interface with Postfix which are completely unsupported.

In fact, they might change any time on Postfix updates and break MailScanner (or worse: cause data loss due to MailScanner's assumptions on how postfix accesses the data). Such breakages (so far, to my knowledge, without data loss possibility) have happened in the past and might happen again in the future.

So if you insist on using MailScanner instead of the much more robust amavisd-new (or other smtp-proxying scanners), you should at least be aware that you need to be very careful whenever you update either Postfix or MailScanner.

There has been a lot of discussion about this on the postfix mailinglists in the past.

Regards, Sven

For some people it is intresting for whatever reason to use SpamAssin together with a Windows based smtp-proxy. You can achieve this with NoSpamProxy. They have a demo version for 30 days available under http://www.nospamproxy.de/nospamproxy.htm

Uwe

 Would it work for CentOS 6?

Greetings!!!

But it is really more simple to download http://sourceforge.net/projects/osmailcleaner/ and just install it in 15 minutes ...

More easy to manage and update  in the future ...

Best regards 
Olivier

First of all thanks for the document.  If I wasn't a complete n00b with this it would be perfect.  I have Server 12.04 LTS, the package selection screen does not have editors or compiler tools listed.  and when I went under manual installation....well let's just said I am not ready for that yet. 

I request  more detail on how to choose the packages.

Thanks!

Your blog is so informative thanks for sharing.This is a great information for Spam Filtering Service. Keep it up!