Fedora Core 2 mail server and spam protection

[Coco]

I have fedora core 2 installed, I just did the full install when setting it up and then made some minor changes to script files and started apps like dovecot. After that I had e-mail working. But now spam is becoming a problem.

What is the easiest way to help get rid of spam? I looked aorund a little and some people mentioned spamassassin.apache.org. Which could be what I'm looking for, but I'm sort of wondering if there is something built into fedora core 2 that I could just configure and turn on. I can't afford for the email server to go down so I'd like to keep the changes as simple as possible. If I have to install something I of course will.

Perhaps there is a guide about installing spam filters on a currently running email server which I could read.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Roxoff]

The way I do it is by adding this to my m4 config file:

FEATURE(dnsbl,`cbl.abuseat.org',`Mail from $&(client_addr) rejected; see http://cbl.abuseat.org')dnl

and recompiling my sendmail configuration. I also have other black hole list providers added too.

[Coco]

Thanks for the reply. I don't want to sound retarded here, but could I ask where that file is? I mean I sorta remember an m4 file when setting it up, but I only got through the setup by using guides. I mean I'm not a complete retard with linux, but I'm not overly confident.

Also, could I ask what command I need to use to recompiile sendmail. It seems to me it was listed in the m4 file as a comment.

Anyways thanks for the help. I really appreciate it.

[Roxoff]

You dont need to recompile sendmail, only the m4 config for your domain. If you've been through the tutorial at sendmail.org before, you should have a domain config file ('yourdomain'.m4) that you edited.

Dont worry if you dont remember much about this, btw, 'cos sendmail is so stable that I hardly ever have to touch the config - and when I do, I have to go back to the instructions on that site to refresh my memory.

Your domain config will probably be in either /etc/mail or in /usr/share/sendmail-cf. You should have named it for your email domain.

If the file exists, then just add the line I suggested and rebuild using the m4 tool and the instructions on the sendmail site. Otherwise, you'll have to go back to the sendmail site and work through the examples again to generate yourself a new m4 file (not a particularly hard thing to do, either).