SPAMfiltering and Exchange 2003

[ICTNUT]

Hello all,

 

I am fed up with the level of SPAM that seems to be hitting my Excahnge server these days so as a new year resolution I have decided to install/implement a SPAM/AV solution.

 

I have come up with two options:

 

1 - FreeBSD & SPAMAssassin

2 - Proxmox (http://www.proxmox.com/)

 

What I want to know is if I decide to go down the FreeBSD route how does SPAMAssassin route emails into the Exchange Server?? MTA possibly??

 

I know Proxmox is "Real" easy to install but i think that the freebsd option will give me more flexabiltiy.

 

Any pointers or help would be great especially if you have this kind of solution in place already.

[CyberNerd]

What I want to know is if I decide to go down the FreeBSD route how does SPAMAssassin route emails into the Exchange Server?? MTA possibly??

 

Set up the MTA (postfix,sendmail,exim etc) as a relay.

Check out Mailscanner - spamassassin integrated with antivirus:

http://www.mailscanner.info/

[ICTNUT]

@Cybernerd:

 

Thanks for the pointers and I will take a look at MailScanner as suggested.

[Geoff]

I'd recommend exim for your MTA. You can bolt on AV scanning too if you wish (ClamAV is probably best). I use Amavis-new as glue.

[ICTNUT]

Cheers Geoff.

 

I am going to be building a test box today so I may post at sometime if I run into trouble ;-)

[ICTNUT]

Is there any kind of favour'd spec for a PC for this purpose??

 

I am looking at filtering around 2000 mailboxes, I do not yet know what kind of bandwidth or throughput this will take or the actual message load but hey it's kids we are talking about here so it bound to be high.

 

I am thinking of installing onto a PC with the following:

 

AMD 2400+ 18Ghz

1gb Ram

80Gb HD

Intel MoBo

Dual intel NICs <-- Do I really need 2 of these??

[Geoff]

Should be ok. A targeted spam attack on your mail domain will likely result in delayed mail though. Is that likely to be a problem?

 

Mail isn't network intensive, you really don't need two nics. If you wish to improve the performance of the machine then look at the CPU and memory.

[ICTNUT]

Cheers Geoff, i'll let you know how I get on

 

I wouldn't say I was a linux noob but I am when it come to SPAM and AV control on *nix.

[ICTNUT]

Question: For admin purposes does Mailscanner or Spamassassin have a web based GUI or if not is there a hack to get one??

[CyberNerd]

Both have webmin modules - the Spamassassin one is a standard webmin module but I've not used either

http://webadminmodules.sourceforge.net/?page=Servers

[Geoff]

Or do you mean a front end for the user to control their anti spam settings?

[ICTNUT]

I want to try an limit the amount of user interaction/intervention to as little as possible.

 

From past experience I can pretty much gaurantee that most will not even check for quarantine mail so the idea would be to place them in to a holding mailbox that either I or my techie can access and forward on if need be.

 

However when it comes to me changing configuration settings it would be nice to have a web front end that I can access from anywhere and also some reports too.

 

I have found this --> http://mailwatch.sourceforge.net/doku.php which does like quiet nice but it requires PHP and MySQL and I am not sure how easy it is going to be to install those.

 

I have FreeBSD installed and both MailScanner and Perl are installing now so all is looking promising

[Geoff]

That's fair enough. The way spam assassin works is that you specific site wide settings. Then per domain settings. Then individual user settings. You can neglect the user/domain settings and it'll fall back to the site wide settings. Just be aware that it's less flexible when setup that way.

[ICTNUT]

Ok, here goes.

 

As an update I could not get FreeBSD and mailscanner to work, following the online pointers to get Exim and mailscanner to work it referes to parts of the config files that do not exist and so will not work when i try to start it.

 

I have installed and setupp successfully (and is currently running live) proxmox however the features we need are not in the free version and it does cost abit to upgrade so for the time being I am happy that some spam and av is being done but it is not a final solution.

 

Does anyone know of a step by step idiots guide to getting something like this setup?? I am after:

 

FULL SPAM Control (with RBL & SBL & SPF & Greylisting)

AV Control

Ability to send SPAM to a dedicated mailbox

Would be nice if it had a web frontend for viewing logs, reports, and changing admin settings, but not essential

 

I would really like to get this up and running and don't really want to run and hide and cave into buy expensive windows licences........

[CyberNerd]

http://www.howtoforge.com/postfix_antispam_mailscanner_clamav_ubuntu

[ICTNUT]

Thank you cybernerd :-)