[Cumbria] Chores

[Paul Broomfield]

Interesting!
I am currently looking at various anti spam solutions for qmail. I am
looking at tmda. The reason that this is getting my attention more than
spamassassin is that its very simple and very easy to manage from a
plugin to qmailadmin. Well I say that but I haven't fully tested it at
yet as I am in the middle of doing migration testing ( trying to move
from redhat to FreeBSD for the front end nodes ). I have also had a look
at some of the commercial solutions but they all lack the ability to
easily manage the solution for individual domains and users. We host
about 70 domains and about 3000Users. We also have to take into
consideration that for about 20 domains we just do smpt forwarding
rather than hosting the mailboxes. This gives a couple of unusual
issues. Anything that works purely from dot-qmail files is ideal for the
domains where we host the pop boxes but useless for those that we just
forward. However triggering antispam threw qmail-scanner or amavis means
that we don't have any control over what domains and users get filtered.
Implementing something across the board is just not acceptable as some
people would endup complaining if they got false negatives. One solution
that I have been thinking about doing for a while is to get
qmail-scanner to parse the email and then only scan the mail biased on a
database of users / domains. Any one have any thoughts about how hard it
would be to write such a program, or does any one know of something that
will already do what I need it to do?

Regards,

Paul Broomfield



>-----Original Message-----
>From: cumbria-admin@mailman.lug.org.uk 
>[mailto:cumbria-admin@mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Roger Cope
>Sent: 02 March 2003 10:18
>To: cumbria@mailman.lug.org.uk
>Subject: [Cumbria] Chores
>
>
>I caught up on some chores this weekend:
>
>Got spamassassin working against my qmail server. No problems 
>there... I am running it as a system wide service and it just works.
>
>If anyone is unfamiliar with spamassassin, it works by reading 
>your mail and giving each message marks based on how 'spam 
>like' it is. Once a message has been identified as spam it can 
>be tagged or disposed of.
>
>I choose to leave the default tagging on (which has the 
>advantage of disguising HTML mail: a new trick is apparently 
>to have HTML messages automatically write back to the spammer 
>so they know you exist even if you don't reply to them).
>
>Spamassassin picks up _a lot_ of false positives if you're on 
>mailing lists and the easiest way to sort that out is to set 
>up whitelists in local user accounts.
>
>Today, Sunday, is a day when I don't get email typically. This 
>morning I got one email and 25 spams and Spamasssassin cleared 
>them all into trash automagically. I still flick through the 
>headers at present to make sure everything is spam but once I 
>am happy that will stop.
>
>Over the course of a week I have had 2 or 3 spams that got 
>through but am typically getting 20 a day, so that's not bad. 
>The ones that get through seem to be fairly ordinary plain 
>text messages, which you'd expect. I could blacklist them and 
>will if they repeat.
>
>I also had another go at CUPS printing on my samba server for 
>windows clients. Still no joy... My conf files were set up 
>correctly when compared with Dave's. I have now given up and 
>will try again with RH8.1.
>
>Now to start learning php...
>
>Roger
>--------------------------------------------
>Roj is also available at: 
>http://www.morphaniel.com
>roger.cope@bnfl.com
>