Spam Filter

[Darylrese]

What is the best SPAM filter to use?

We currently recieve over 1000 SPAM emails a day to the school and its becoming rediculious. I have a SPAM filter called VamSoft ORF on exchange which is a simple filter comprising of a whitelist, blacklist, greylisting etc however all it tends to do is redirect mail to a mailbox which i then have to manually look through everyday. Also it marks far to many genuine emails as SPAM which staff are not happy about.

Which filter do you use? We have a microsoft volume license so anything microsoft would be great as we are already licensed, however we can look at alternatives.

I did install Forefront 2010 for exchange, however our exchange grinded to a halt, probably because i need to increase the number of cores on the virtual machine (currently only set to 2). If this is the best product, i will look into upgrading the VM.

[CyberNerd]

What is the best SPAM filter to use?

Google mail.

Before that we used mailscanner/ which includes spamassassin

[Darylrese]

you got rid of your exchange all together then?

[glennda]

you got rid of your exchange all together then?

Cybernerd used Google Apps for Everything. Another vote for Mail Scanner here I use the community edition as a service platform its very good and can be clustered easily.

[Darylrese]

is that Linux based?

[CyberNerd]

is that Linux based?

No, its based on spamassassin, sendmail and clamav.
It runs on most unices including Linux.

[glennda]

No, its based on spamassassin, sendmail and clamav.
It runs on most unices including Linux.

This prebuilt Mailcleaner one runs on linux (debian) - and is the one I use start [Mailcleaner] I setup mine for 60 domains to multiple addresses in about an hour after install.

EDIT: I have assigned it 60gb disk and 1.5gb ram and runs happily.

it is also based on the same as MailScanner.

[Geoff]

I've put Linux boxes between Exchange and the outside world running postfix+SpamAssassin+Amavisd-new plenty of times. It helps cut out a lot of junk mail. However assuming you have a new(ish) version of Exchange doesn't it do a lot of antispam out of the box?

[Darylrese]

being a bit of a noob to this, do i need a linux box as I only have Server 2008 R2 at the moment and zero experience in linux to be honest.

Our exchange is running Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 SP2

[glennda]

being a bit of a noob to this, do i need a linux box as I only have Server 2008 R2 at the moment and zero experience in linux to be honest.

for mailcleaner you don't need to be able to use linux - its all done through a nice web interface just the underneath runs linux - during setup you give it an IP and a name.

[Darylrese]

OK so i can install it on a Server 2008 R2 VM?

[glennda]

OK so i can install it on a Server 2008 R2 VM?

you can install it on a VM yes - mine does fine.

[Darylrese]

you can install it on a VM yes - mine does fine.

On a windows OS?

[glennda]

On a windows OS?

The host running windows? Or the VM? What platform does your VM's sit on? ESXI/Xen/Hyper-V?

The ISO downloadable come pre-packaged. Create a new VM using the ISO as install media. it installs everything and during setup asks for IP, Name, Password. Then access the web interface to do everything else.

[Darylrese]

oh ok i already have a windows server 2008 r2 VM ready to go, i get what you mean now. We use VSphere for virtual machines