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  1. #1
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    Mar 2003
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    Effective Anti-Spam Solution?

    I'm doing some research and I wanted personal opinions. Besides SpamAssassin, what are some of the alternatives out there?

    I've looked hard at Mailfoundry, but I need something with just software and the per mailbox route is not exactly efficient for me. I know ASSP is out there - is it a good choice?

    Thanks for any suggestions.

  2. #2
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    Oct 2002
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    We've been using Mailscanner and are very pleased with it.
    http://www.mailscanner.info/
    Don't have the time to install yourself, configserver has a pretty low cost service ($45 one time fee) for installing that and a few goodies with it.
    Your one stop shop for decentralization

  3. #3
    I would install MailScanner, it works nice, give it a try.

    Regards
    http://creawebsolutions.com
    Server Management & Web Security.

  4. #4
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    Nov 2007
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    Edmonton
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    OpenBSD's spamd with greylisting enabled is quite a nice option.

    Admittedly not a very practical one for some people.

  5. #5
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    Jun 2003
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    352
    ASSP is a great choice. Have been using it for a week so far, and it filtered out 1400 spam emails.

  6. #6
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    Nov 2004
    Location
    Ashburn, VA
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    I switched from Mailfoundry to Postini in October of last year, I've maybe received 2-3 spam messages in my inboxes since. Their service is top-notch and "just works". They handle all of the management and all you have to do is tell them where to deliver your mail. Google recently acquired them for upwards of 625M so you know they're doing something right. =]

    If you want to run something server-side, I'd recommend Dspam.
    Alexander McMillen
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  7. #7
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    Another vote for Mailscanner.

  8. #8
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    Aug 2004
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    Shanghai
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    I don't think you can get rid of spams with only ONE solution. It's always with multiple tools that it works best. Here is what you should look into:

    - have the minimum ruleset in postfix to get rid of the very badly written email (like rejecting non-fqdn senders and recipient and all this kind of logics)
    - use SPF checkings and grey listing (I suggest you tumgreyspf for which I wrote a Debian package (currently searching for a debian developper to sponsor the upload in SID))
    - use RBL checkings
    - use amavis + clamav + spamassassin to get rid of virus and the most obvious spams
    - use courier-maildrop to deliver spams detected by spamassassin to a SPAM folder
    - use sa-learn to be able to use the bayesian filter of spamassassin

    Anybody has more ideas that we haven't implemented yet in our control panel? I'd be happy to add some more to the big list...

    Thomas
    GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide (I'm founder, CEO & official Debian Developer)
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  9. #9
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    Jan 2006
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    Athens, Greece
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    SpamAssasin + Mimedefang. If you know perl mimedefang is very powerful.

  10. #10
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    UK
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    Quote Originally Posted by gplhost View Post
    I don't think you can get rid of spams with only ONE solution. It's always with multiple tools that it works best. Here is what you should look into:

    - have the minimum ruleset in postfix to get rid of the very badly written email (like rejecting non-fqdn senders and recipient and all this kind of logics)
    - use SPF checkings and grey listing (I suggest you tumgreyspf for which I wrote a Debian package (currently searching for a debian developper to sponsor the upload in SID))
    - use RBL checkings
    - use amavis + clamav + spamassassin to get rid of virus and the most obvious spams
    - use courier-maildrop to deliver spams detected by spamassassin to a SPAM folder
    - use sa-learn to be able to use the bayesian filter of spamassassin

    Anybody has more ideas that we haven't implemented yet in our control panel? I'd be happy to add some more to the big list...

    Thomas
    Nothing will remove everything completely but Mailscanner does a really good job, removing almost all spam after proper configuration and with ongoing 'learn' for those akward ones.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
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    Shanghai
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    grandad, why to you quote me like this? There's absolutely no point doing it. Your answer has nothing to do with what I say, why do you quote my FULL message...

    Don't take it badly, but like many others, I think you need to learn how to quote.

    Thomas
    GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide (I'm founder, CEO & official Debian Developer)
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  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by gplhost View Post
    grandad, why to you quote me like this? There's absolutely no point doing it. Your answer has nothing to do with what I say, why do you quote my FULL message...

    Don't take it badly, but like many others, I think you need to learn how to quote.

    Thomas
    Why does it bother you?
    Does it matter?
    Is it life and death?

    I am pointing out that most of what you quote in many lines can be accomplished by Mailscanner.

  13. #13
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    Aug 2004
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    1/ Yes it bothers as it doesn't point anything and takes useless time to read.

    2/ I don't think anybody had understood your point (that all could be done by Mailscanner)

    3/ I totally disagree, it would be a very weak setup to have only Mailscanner (which by the way, is not a very good tool as I could hear from my partner in Paris that stops using it). Header checks, RBL, SPF checkings and grey listing is really something you NEED to do BEFORE sending your eventual spams to a spam scanner. Your approach is IMHO completely wrong as this would add a lot of unnecessary load to the mail server.

    Thomas
    GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide (I'm founder, CEO & official Debian Developer)
    Servers & our leading control panel and our Xen VPS hosting, which are already included in Debian and Ubuntu
    Available in: Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Sydney, Seattle, Atlanta, Paris, London, Barcelona, Zurich, Israel

  14. #14
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    Okay Thomas it isn't worth getting yourself upset about it, I am not wanting to argue with you, have a nice day.

  15. #15
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    good thread, lots of good info
    Ditlev Bredahl. CEO,
    OnApp.com + Cloud.net & CDN.net

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by sliqua View Post
    I switched from Mailfoundry to Postini in October of last year, I've maybe received 2-3 spam messages in my inboxes since. Their service is top-notch and "just works". They handle all of the management and all you have to do is tell them where to deliver your mail.
    +1 for Postini. Sure, it costs a little bit, but right now they're filtering out about 75% of our mail volume (by message count) before it ever hits our network. When you take into account how much bandwidth, processing power and most importantly STAFF time it takes to battle the spammers, the price is an absolute bargain. I want to be in the hosting business, not the anti-spam business. Highly recommended.

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    170
    Originally our company server for our website + email was running cPanel and that came with Spam Assassin (inc spam box and box trapper). This proved very effective for several years.

    We then moved to a more streamlined system with a box just hosted Apache, MySQL and mail. For that we had our own installed versions of Exim and Spam Assassin. We found it quite difficult to fine tune to catch spam and prevent false positives.

    After it had blocked a number of genuine messages, we investigated various hosted anti spam services and finally went with the anti-spam/anti-virus from MessageLabs. Their service is very good, backed up by contractual SLAs, 24/7 e-mail and phone support and has some good features.

    We have sinced migrated our e-mail to the Google Apps service which includes anti virus and anti spam anyway. I know how good the GMail systems are and it's exactly the same with Google Apps. They also acquired Postini as mentioned above so I assume they already have or will be migrating their systems to GMail and Google Apps.

    Things like SpamAssassin are good if you can get them configured correctly but larger organisations like MessageLabs and Google are able to test more messages and build up more user submitted data, and I think that's worth a lot when it comes to filtering important e-mail.

  18. #18
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    Mailfoundry...

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hulk View Post
    ASSP is a great choice. Have been using it for a week so far, and it filtered out 1400 spam emails.

    ASSP is good in the begining but gets insanely slow with time. Its not effective for busy mailservers.
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  20. #20
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    MailFoundry works for me very well.
    One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

  21. #21
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    Jan 2004
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    1,042
    mailfoundry did not work well for me at all when it came to using it through easyantispam.com. It let about 5x the amount of spam through in comparison with my mailscanner/spamassassin solution.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by MACscr View Post
    mailfoundry did not work well for me at all when it came to using it through easyantispam.com. It let about 5x the amount of spam through in comparison with my mailscanner/spamassassin solution.
    Hmm... Seems everyone gets different results. For me it was the opposite.

    I enabled MailFoundry and voila most of the SPAM disappeared. There were a few false positives but, thats rectified now.

    And I got it through MailFoundry directly.

    Thanks for the link though. I'll check them out too.
    One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

  23. #23
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    Aug 2004
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    To me, MailFoundry is not any better than spamassassin, they both work on SPAM signatures (kind of checksum? Not sure...) to know if it's spam or not. Also, MailFoundry is quite expensive. If your spamassassin is trained using sa-learn (which what is possible with our control panel), then you achieve exactly the same thing. Sure, you have to train it, but it doesn't take that much time to do so.

    Thomas
    GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide (I'm founder, CEO & official Debian Developer)
    Servers & our leading control panel and our Xen VPS hosting, which are already included in Debian and Ubuntu
    Available in: Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Sydney, Seattle, Atlanta, Paris, London, Barcelona, Zurich, Israel

  24. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by ReyoxHosting View Post
    ASSP is good in the begining but gets insanely slow with time. Its not effective for busy mailservers.
    How long is "with time"?
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  25. #25
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    I went with MailScanner and it's been great thus far. I watched it for a good week in labeling spam and it has been pretty darn good. I've let it start deleting mail because thanks to a slip up on a script that I purchased, my company email was blasted out over the internet. I was getting 50-100 messages today and the number was growing. With MailScanner running right now, I'm receiving just a few a day now, in the neighborhood of 5 or so. I cannot complain about those results.

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