Topic: Spam

[Duncan]

Out of curiosity. What Spam filtering software are people running.

Any pros and cons for your choice.I have set up Spam Bouncer which seems fairly good.

Regards Duncan

[brian read]

I'm interested in Spam Bouncer, any chance of a Mini-howto?

[chris meredith]

I'm running Spam Assasin.  It works fairly well.  I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, including ones from places like Buy.com and such, so I get some false positives.  I have setup some autowhitelist entries which takes care of most of them.

Check this thread:
http://www.e-smith.org/bboard//read.php?f=3&i=18714&t=18714

Any body try this yet?:
http://www.garyarnold.com/projects.php#bayespam

[Patrick Hickey]

I use dungog's TMDA package.

I like the simply approach to SPAM and this is a simple approach. Works like a charm.

regards,

patrick

[Duncan]

Brian, I can do a mini howto. Do you have Darrell Mays e-mail add on installed. Its not a requirement but it makes things easier.

Chris and Patrick. Thanks for your responses. I will probably stick with SpamBouncer For the time being. It is catching everything.

I like the concept of TDMA, but i am worried that my customers might not like the extra requirement for getting the first mail thru.

Regards Duncan

[brian read]

Duncan

I Presume you mean the procmail addin? no problem to install it.

I look forward to the howto.

I also doubt that my users will be happy with TDMA.

cheers

Brian

[Duncan]

Ok,

Install this one (if you havnt already)

http://myezserver.com/downloads/mitel/contrib/user-manager/user-manager-howto.html

Set your user to "normal" and then "geek" mode.

I created a directory in /opt called sb ie /opt/sb - and downloaded the Spambouncer files from here

http://www.spambouncer.org/sb.tar.Z into this directory.

To extract run

uncompress sb.tar.Z
tar -xvf sb.tar

The following is a copy of my .procmailrc with the SpamBouncer additions.

SHELL=/bin/bash
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
FORMAIL=/usr/bin/formail
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
PMDIR=$HOME
SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail

# ------------
# some logging
# ------------

VERBOSE=no
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log

# Spambouncer

SBDIR=/opt/sb
SPAM=$HOME/spam
CONFIG=$HOME/home/mail

ALWAYSBLOCK=${CONFIG}/deny.txt
NOBOUNCE=${CONFIG}/nocheck.txt

LOCALHOSTFILE=${SPAM}/.localhostfile
MYEMAIL=${SPAM}/.myemail
LEGITLISTS=${SPAM}/.legitlists
EXECHECKING=no
EXEDOCCHECKING=no

# start of user recipies
# ----------------------

:0
* ^Subject.*Cron run-parts /etc/cron.daily
/dev/null

:0
* ^Subject.*Cron /etc/startmail
/dev/null

:0
* ^Subject.*HylaFAX Usage Report
/dev/null

# Regenerate "From" lines to make sure they are valid
:0 fhw
| formail -I "From " -a "From "

# Filter out Mailing List Mail
:0:
* ^TOdevinfo@lists.e-smith.org
$DEFAULT


# Call Spambouncer
INCLUDERC=${SBDIR}/sb.rc

# all else goes to the inbox
# --------------------------
:0
$DEFAULT

I created a folder in my home directory called spam where i keep my config files for spambouncer. I created a folder called mail in network neighbourhood where i keep the config files i want to be able to change on a regular basis.

The deny.txt and nocheck.txt go into this folder.

If you do all of this as root you may have to change the permissions around. I generally logon as the user as per this method

http://www.dungog.net/sme/howto/usershell.html

to do this kind of stuff.

This solution takes up a lot of resources when filtering mail. I set the

EXECHECKING=no
EXEDOCCHECKING=no

because i am using RAV. Setting these to yes on a low end machine will bog the system down when large e-mails come in.

Have a go, and post any problems here.

Regards Duncan

[Duncan]

I should have mentioned that the above settings do nothing to the e-mails except tag them as spam (and a few other things). Have a look at the headers when they come thru. I have set some filters up on my client to drop them into a folder called spam. this way i can keep an eye on things for a while before setting the system to a more destructive mode.

The settings i made change the settings in the sb.rc file under /opt/sb. This allows each mailbox to be set up differently dependent on your needs. It also saves your configuration should you upgrade SpamBouncer at a later stage. Basically any setting you change should go in your .procmailrc file and any thing you leave as default can stay in the sb.rc file.

Regards Duncan