Spam suggestions/recommendations

[steelrazor]

Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions for dealing with spam on an exchange server?

At the moment our general school email address gets spammed to high heaven! I've got some ideas on how to deal with it but just wondered if anyone's got any spam solutions to recommend?

[Geoff]

Stick a Linux front end mailer running spam assassin between it and the internet.

[steelrazor]

Hehe, i'll have to get my head round linux first. Never used it!

Is there a particular distribution i should be using (or do i not know what i'm talking about at all because i've just read up about linux for the past 10 minutes?)

[Geoff]

Personally my favorite at the moment is Ubuntu. Of more importance is which MTA you use. Sendmail/Qmail aren't very newbie friendly. I'd recommend Postfix or preferably Exim for a beginner.

[steelrazor]

I've got some homework to do then ;-)

Thanks for the advice, am going to investigate into Ubuntu/Exim/SpamAssassin

The stuff they don't tell you on Microsoft Exchange courses ey!

random thought: (I really hate that "No more eating for you now" song they play on radio 1)

[Norphy]

Are you running Exchange 2003? If you haven't already, set up the Intelligent Mail Filter on the Exchange server. It is part of Exchange 2003 SP2 and available as an addon for SP1 and before.

It's not perfect but it helps eat a lot of spam.

[OutToLunch]

Re IMF - Note that if you're using Exchange in a catchall/distribute POP3 scenario rather than a 'proper' SMTP setup, IMF does sweet FA; took me a good while to figure that out!!!

Has anyone tried running SpamAssassin directly on their Exchange server? I've seen a few Windows ports/implementations of it that looked interesting...

[Disease]

We use the GFI suite, works well. We have

GFI

Mail Essentials
Mail Security
and Archiver.

[Geoff]

how much does that cost?

[Simcfc73]

We use GFI MailEssentials and MailSecurity. Cost about £800 last year for 100 mailboxes, just paid a renewal for the antivirus and spam filters and the support which was about £500.

Very very easy to setup and use and it just works.

This is what is caught in the last 12 months on a small network (100 staff mailboxes)

Total Processed 54489
Total Spam 31101
Keyword Checking 1544
Header Checking 823
Blacklist 403
Bayesian Analysis 2582
DNS Blacklist 13510
SPF 288
Directory Harvesting 8228
Spam URL Blacklist 2905
Phishing URL Blacklist 818
Spam Percentage 57%

[Geoff]

Spam Percentage 57%

Pretty good, we're at 89% spam here.

[Disease]

My Bayesian Analysis is at around 15k we are at around 90% all filtered at the moment, you always get some through though.

An example is my head emailed me saying she had 8 Junk Emails in her in box even though 397 had been filtered out, not bad going really.

[Simcfc73]

I think my results were off because for the first 3 months I was the only one using it. In the past 7 days its ranged from 75% to 95% spam.

[steelrazor]

What settings do people use for IMF eg. what SCL ratings do you usually have in place?

[steve]

We have the block set at 8, with these being deleted.
Junk Email SCL set at 6.

Connection Filtering, we have 2 block lists setup:

Spamhaus - sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
Spamcop - bl.spamcop.net

With these and sophos puremessage, we now have very little spam. Well except for the internal stuff - I don't suppose anyone here wants one of our science technicians cats either