[Sussex] Need a new web host

[Ronan Chilvers]

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 14:30:39 +0000
Jon Fautley <jfautley at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm not a fan of using extra apps where they're not required (i.e.
> Exim does spam/virus scanning itself) - but I understand that it
> might be useful to push the scanning away from the MTA as much as
> possible (the 1st thing to die when spamassassin threw a wobbly was
> exim, followed by Dovecot (IMAP service)).

For me the benefit of amavisd is that while it does add load, it is
able to integrate spam and virus scanning into one place. It can
natively use spamassassin so doesn't need spamd running and it can
happily communicate with clamd.  I use postfix which has a variety of
hooks to allow content filters, etc but doesn't allow you to directly
integrate this kind of scanning into the MTA.  I think its the
developer's opinion that its not the job of the MTA to do heavy
duty content filtering, ie: virus scanning, spam analysis.

> 
> > Greylisting was the biggy for me - very low resource cost and makes
> > a huge difference to your spam intake, with negligible
> > inconvenience. Tried it?
> 
> Yeah, I tried greylisting ~18 months ago. It did work well, but I
> didn't like the fact that it slowed down email quite significantly
> from certain sites (gmail, hotmail, etc all got stressed with
> greylisting).

Yeah, greylisting does assume that the client MTA is always on the same
host but whitelisting mitigates this problem... exclude domains /
servers / IPs that are on your whitelist from the greylisting process.
I've got about 20 odd entries in my whitelist for people like hotmail,
etc., ie: services that have a pool of SMTP servers, any of which could
be the next client.

Cheers
-- 
Ronan
e: ronan at thelittledot.com
t: 01903 739 997
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