Spam blocking on mail server

Street · 3 May 2008 at 19:16

Am just in the process of setting up a new CentOS server for mail and domain hosting and was looking into spam blocking.

I have read about Spam Assasin, Mail Scanner and ASSP but am not sure which one is the best one to use!

Would it be advisable to install ClamAV with one of those for best protection?

Any advice welcome!

Andy

dave-lew99 · 3 May 2008 at 20:10

We use SpamAssassin hooked in with ClamAV and a solid postfix config at work and it's pretty strong, we very rarely get any spam through to the office, yet when looking at the logs theres plenty of attempts made.

ChrisB · 3 May 2008 at 21:15

dave-lew99 said:
We use SpamAssassin hooked in with ClamAV and a solid postfix config

I've got a setup that does exactly the same, but it also has greylisting (gld)

Street · 3 May 2008 at 21:26

I've just installed MailScanner and SpamAssassin.. Going to install ClamAV shortly and have a play with them.

Street · 3 May 2008 at 23:10

Hmm.. Need to set up a chroot jail for Postfix to get MailScanner to work.. How do I do that?

AndrewP · 4 May 2008 at 07:57

I don't think you need a chroot jail, but if your install (via yum/apt etc.) hasn't set one up you can download the source code and check out the examples/chrootsetup directory I think.

madman045 · 6 May 2008 at 20:08

Something along these lines perhaps?

http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual-users-domains-postfix-mailscanner-mailwatch-centos5.1

Street · 6 May 2008 at 20:24

I didn't need a chroot jail in the end.. Its working perfectly as it is!

Set the server going live today with some proper domains on and did some tests with the GFI email test. Seems a hell of a lot better than our old server!

Just going to have to spend a bit of time tweaking some of the config files now..

feenster99 · 6 May 2008 at 22:34

Care to share how you set it up? I think i'm going to do the same on a CentOS 5 dedicated web server i have.

Matt

AndrewP · 7 May 2008 at 09:08

You could do a lot worse than using the howtoforge link above, I've used a setup identical except for LDAP instead of MySQL and it worked well

.

Street · 7 May 2008 at 21:34

feenster99 said:
Care to share how you set it up? I think i'm going to do the same on a CentOS 5 dedicated web server i have.

Matt

Add me to MSN if you like, should be able to give you a hand if you get stuck!

feenster99 · 7 May 2008 at 22:16

Hi,
Thanks, i'll have a read through the guide and try it on a virtual machine. Does it have much of an impact on the Server's overall performance, doing all that checking? It will be going on a production web server, so i don't want to take too much of a hit. Saying that, it will only be handling about 500 emails an hour or so.

Matt