mail server setup

Janina Sajka janina at rednote.net
Mon Jan 18 17:17:34 EST 2016 

Well, John. You might just change my mind about spamassassin. Care to
share your configuration somewhere? I'm willing to give it another try.

I agree that crowd-sourced enhancements could indeed be powerful in this
use case.

Janina

John G Heim writes:
> I don't think there is a better spam filtering tool than spamassassin. I ran
> the mail server for my department and all by myself, I was able to get
> filtering as efficient as the campus mail server which used a commercial
> product and had a full-time employee tuning it. The secret is crowd
> sourcing. I had it download a new set of rules nightly and configured it to
> use 3 crowd sourced systems, dcc, razor and pyzor. It took a while to set
> all that up but once it was done, all I had to do was sit back and let the
> world tune my spam filter.
> 
> Spamassassin is a bigger resource hog than anything else in a mail system. I
> think that is probably true of any spam/virus filter. There is just a lot to
> do.  And really, it's the virus scanning part that is the worst. You don't
> want to skip that. We had about 200 users on a machine with 16 cores and 32
> Gb of ram. It never had a problem with the load.
> 
> On 01/11/2016 01:43 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I've got my crm set up via my personal ~/.procmailrc . It can also be
> >setup system wide, however I haven't needed that recently.
> >
> >The crm home page does discuss site wide deployment:
> >http://crm114.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php
> >
> >I note one can even use it with Spamassassin. I didn't go that way. I
> >dropped Spamassassin because it was spawning far too many processes that
> >were absorbing far too much of my available system resources, so that
> >other tasks on my server were suffering.
> >
> >Am I completely happy with the results? No. I still get too many false
> >positives and consequently still need to look at my spam folder from
> >time to time. I've white-listed many more email sources than I would
> >have expected.
> >
> >However, I see no more than a dozen or so emails in my inbox daily, and
> >that's a big improvement over what I was getting from Spamassassin.
> >
> >hth
> >
> >Janina
> >
> >
> >covici at ccs.covici.com writes:
> >>How would you use crm114 for spam filtering?  Also, I am unfamiliar with
> >>dkim and dmark, -- I do have sendmail -- how would those help?
> >>
> >>Janina Sajka <janina at rednote.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>>Juan Hernandez writes:
> >>>>I need webmail, imap, virtual domains, spam/antivirus protection, etc.
> >>>Let's take them one at a time ...
> >>>
> >>>webmail
> >>>This one is easy. Go with squirrelmail .
> >>>
> >>>  imap
> >>>  Another easy one, dovecot .
> >>>
> >>>  virtual domains
> >>>  Any mta worth its salt will give you this. It's pretty trivial, e.g. in
> >>>  sendmail you simply add domains into a config file, one per line. If
> >>>  need be, you can get more elaborate, e.g. direct mail addressed to
> >>>  a at b.c. to d at e.f. It's all very doable.
> >>>
> >>>  spam/antivirus protection
> >>>  This one is more complicated, and more important. I'm sure you're not
> >>>  interested in becoming an open relay for every spammer on the planet?
> >>>  So:
> >>>
> >>>  Antivirus -- You probably only care if you have users on Windows.
> >>>  clamav is my choice for this, though mine is curently broken--I don't
> >>>  have windows clients.
> >>>
> >>>  anti-spam -- much of this depends on a good mta configuration. Today's
> >>>  mta's, you'll probably select either sendmail or procmail, set you up
> >>>  by default with a pretty good configuration. You'll want to carefully
> >>>  read your way through the config file to understand what's going on.
> >>>  This is the starting point.
> >>>
> >>>  Next is the process of sorting the mail that arrives into "probably OK"
> >>>  and "probably junk" piles. People used to rely on spamassassin for
> >>>  that, but I found it far too resource heavy and stopped using it about
> >>>  two years ago. I'm now using crm114. And, with Jason White, I'm looking
> >>>  at possibly moving to rstampd .
> >>>
> >>>  In any case, you'll want to configure dkim and dmark for your mta.
> >>>  These assist the net in assuring you and everyone else that what you
> >>>  receive, and what you send is legit.
> >>>
> >>>  Spam is a never ending battle. Expect to need to work on your
> >>>  configurations and approaches from time to time as the months and years
> >>>  go by.
> >>>
> >>>  If this sounds daunting, that's probably good. It's not a trivial task,
> >>>  but it can be fun and certainly can be rewarding. I certainly have no
> >>>  interest in giving up my setup for some service somewhere else.
> >>>
> >>>  hth
> >>>
> >>>  Janina
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>-- 
> >>>
> >>>Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
> >>>			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
> >>>		Email:	janina at rednote.net
> >>>
> >>>Linux Foundation Fellow
> >>>Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org
> >>>
> >>>The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
> >>>Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa
> >>>
> >>>_______________________________________________
> >>>Speakup mailing list
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> >>>
> >>-- 
> >>Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> >>How do
> >>you spend it?
> >>
> >>          John Covici
> >>          covici at ccs.covici.com
> >>_______________________________________________
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> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

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