home spam server, is it possible?

[tmask]

Ive read many articles on building Linux based spam/antivirus filters but they all seem to be for offices and geared towards exchange and other things I as a home user dont use. I am new to Linux and only recently started toying with it for the sole purpose of building a spam filter for my home. What i had in mind was a server that i set up with everyone's usernames and passwords (we use windows XP, outlook express and verizon for email) and have the server download all the mail for everyone and store it locally. Then the server would scan it for viruses etc and do its spam filtering. Then when anyone at home checked email Outlook Express would contact the local server instead of verizon to get the scanned/filtered email. This may sound dumb thats my impression of how it would work, and thats the kind of tutorials/setup i thought i would find. But so far every tutorial/article i find seems to either not do this or be geared for domains and exchange servers. Can anyone point me to articles/tutorials to do this, or is it not even possible?

Thanks so much

[danielsmw]

tmask,

Unless you are yourself a spammer, I can't imagine needing one machine dedicated to only email functions for home use.

But, since you're curious, I would say that the best thing to do setup your linux box as a mail server. This should be pretty easily configurable, and popular distros like Fedora or Ubuntu will even have whole software categories for mail servers that you can install.

Perhaps you could write a script that fetchmail's from verizon, identifies the new messages locally, runs them through spamassassin, judges them according to your spam threshold (in other words: how much are you willing to risk losing a legitimate email to filter out illegitimate ones?), and then they can be hosted on the mail server. I'm not really an expert with mail servers, but I did write good 80 page thesis on filtering spam email, so let me know if you have any questions on that regard.

But seriously, that's all hypothetical. Practically, I would suggest that you uust install Thunderbird with SpamAssassin.

[tmask]

danielsmw,
thanks for the response. Yes i realize it may seem a bit excessive, but I do have a few servers at home already, mostly file servers etc. I could use off the shelf anti-spam software, but I wanted a nice project to try and get started with linux. I realize this isnt exactly beginners material, but I find I learn by just diving right into things even if I do make a lot of mistakes in the process. I also found the idea of having all the email ready to download locally to be nice. I have about 8 people using email here and we get some big attachments, so i think it would be faster to have the email downloaded and waiting on an email server rather than wait several minutes for it to come from verizon's server, which seems to be down from time to time anyways. Thank you for the mailfetch suggestion, I dont know anything about that software but I will look into it

[danielsmw]

tmask,

Here's a relatively extensive but easy to read article on setting up a mail server: How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system

Once you set it up as a POP/IMAP server, you can just have the local client connect to that address. Of course, I don't think you need to filter outgoing mail, so they can continue to just use Verizon's SMTP server.

The only really hard part that I'm not sure how to do is how to have the your server fetch mail from Verizon and rehost it locally. As I mentioned, you can use fetchmail or something equivalent to get the mail, but since I've never tried rehosting it through the webserver. It may be as easy as saving the emails to a directory, but it may be more complicated than that.

Either way, have fun, and let me know how it goes! I'm curious now!

-Matthew