Linux as Spam Filtering Server?

[gtmtnbiker98]

Okay, I'm curious to learn how many of you employ a Linux solution for your e-mail gateway SPAM filtering? I am wanting to employ a more robust SPAM filtering solution; however, cannot justify the cost to my employer for a shrink wrapped product. I have looked at Spam Assassin and Postfix and am curious to learn how reliable this type of setup is. I am also interested in an anti-virus solution as well.

Is Linux suitable for this mission and if so, how much maintenance is involved. I want something that you can setup, patch when needed, and it just works. Is this possible?

Our current environment uses an Exchange Server 2003 and this box is fed by another SMTP relay at the gateway that performs screening and of course relay. Pretty simple setup. Ideas, suggestions?

All of the instructional sites that I've found involve FC 4 and the various Red Hat distros. I'm looking for some good pointers in the area of SuSE 10. We currently employ a couple SuSE box's.

[NikTheGeek]

Doesn't help I know as you don't want a shrink wrapped product, but I run Sophos PureMessage on a SuSE box and it's very good. If you do find a freebie, please let me know and I'll look at it too...

Nik

[gtmtnbiker98]

How does Pure Message work? Is it a SPAM filtering application, or what?

[NikTheGeek]

Spam and antivirus in one:
http://www.sophos.com/products/es/gateway/pm-unix.html

Runs on most versions of unix or linux, but it is fussy about the kernel and I don't *think* it will run on SuSE 10. I run it on SuSE 9 Enterprise Server.

Nik

[winter]

I found this article on setting up a email gateway
article this would be a good start after this you can read up on how to implament other features

[gtmtnbiker98]

I've found a step by step walk through on another Web site, using FC4, SpamAssassin and Postfix. However, I was trying to gain some insight as to other user's experience prior to working on this project. I was wanting to stay with SuSE; however, implementing another distro isn't a problem - but it won't be FC, leaning more towards CentOS.

[kkubasik]

What you basicaly do is set it up as you smtp incoming relay, equip it with spamassasin/bogofilter then have it forward email with the modified headers either to another machine, or more popularly, a mailbox using a filtering application such a procmail. Then just allow access via pop3/imap.

[gtmtnbiker98]

I just want a SpamAssasin relay for incoming mail, not to interfere with the existing infrastructure. I'm going to get another machine free at work and do some playing. I will post my results once complete.

[farslayer]

I've been running a Linux mail server for about 3 years now.

I run Postfix, spamassassin, anomy sanitizer, etc etc..

The system currently drops about 84% of the mail that hits the machine and tags a bunch more as spam. system has been stable and reliable I have no complaints. not bad for running on a PII 550 and handling all our corporate email. things should actually improve once I build the new server and update all the components. and add in AV scanning to the mail server. I will be building the new server on a Debian Stable machine.

The Anti-UCE functions in postfix work great, I also utilize the File extension blocking in postfix. along with spamassassin and several blacklists.

There are several how-to's available for integrating a Postfix filtering Gateway into an Exchange environment, the tricky part to me looks like synchronizing the user list from MS Exchange to the linux box so you can properly reject/drop mail for unknown users. no reason to put that load on the Exchange machine and force it to do LDAP lookups for a bunch of nonexistant users.

There are several Postfix/Exchange integration how-to articles are linked from the postfix.org site...

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/post...nge-users.html
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~malth/gaptuning/postfix/
http://flakshack.com/anti-spam/wiki/...is+document%3F

[gtmtnbiker98]

Thanks for the links, I'm from Ohio as well.