Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, beans, sausage, spam.

[indie]

Because I run my own e-mail server I can afford the luxuries of things such as spam assassin to filter out spam from my email. My girlfriend works for a Bridal company and they're getting so much spam it's ridiculous.

Out of 130 e-mails this morning, 120ish were spam, his mail host say they don't have any anti spam measures in place and there's nothing they can do about it, short of moving his email to another host, has anyone used any desktop anti spam products to cut junk mail.

Is there any free software that does the job well or is he looking at paying for something?

[ChrisH]

Whats to afford about spam assasin? You just need to set up an old box as a mail relay and you can run spam assasin and something like Clam AV on it. This what im planning to do over summer.

[witch]

We have used Mailscanner which I think is still free
It isnt perfect but it does help!!

[webman]

MailWasher

[Geoff]

Linux mailrelay running Postfix, Amavis-new, Spamassassin.

[CyberNerd]

currently Mailscanner - combines spamassassin, sendmail, antivirus.

http://www.mailscanner.info/

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by CyberNerd

currently Mailscanner - combines spamassassin, sendmail, antivirus.

http://www.mailscanner.info/

Thanks for that. Should save me a bit of work :P

[indie]

Thanks for the suggestions guy's but they all look like they sit on the mail server. I was after something that sits on the desktop machine and scans as the mail is pulled down from the mail server.

Originally Posted by ChrisH

Whats to afford about spam assasin? You just need to set up an old box as a mail relay and you can run spam assasin and something like Clam AV on it.

I didnt mean afford in a monitary sense, I meant because I have control over my mail server I can put whatever software I please onto it!

Any ideas?

[Norphy]

I agree with Webman, get Mailwasher. On a personal note, I also find the junk mail filter in Outlook 2003 quite effective.

[indie]

Am I missing something here? Doesn't Mailwasher just show you what email you have and let you delete it before downloading it from the server?

That's not really much different from deleting it from the Inbox. Or does Mailwasher make some decision and rate the mail as spam etc?

[Dos_Box]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

Whats to afford about spam assasin? You just need to set up an old box as a mail relay and you can run spam assasin and something like Clam AV on it. This what im planning to do over summer.

Thats exactly what we run at the Lancs server farm for you guys.

[ChrisH]

Yes I know if its there if you opt in I just want to experiment with a local box so I have full control (well as much as we get) over our mail.

[OutToLunch]

Originally Posted by indie

Thanks for the suggestions guy's but they all look like they sit on the mail server. I was after something that sits on the desktop machine and scans as the mail is pulled down from the mail server.

You didn't fill in all the blanks in the original description of the problem, but if you mean that they have a hosted mail solution, no local mailserver and all collect mail from a remote POP server on individual PCs which they do not move from, PopFile does a mean job of Bayesian spam filtering. You might have to take half an hour to explain how to get up and running with it when you first install it, but they should be happy after that...

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

After a week or so of training, this left my mailbox pretty much spam free despite 1000 odd spams a week (yes, bright spark that I am, I used my email address as my userid on Ebay for a while)

[indie]

PopFile looks like it will do the job! I'll suggest it to them and see how it goes.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[john]

I use Spambayes, again its OS software, very good once trained, I have been training it for about 5 years now and its brill! Just using it on afew at work to help reduce Viagra and its helping on that a bit as well.