a new sendmail question
Gerry Doris
gdoris at rogers.com
Mon Dec 31 12:35:38 UTC 2007
John Summerfield wrote:
> Gerry Doris wrote:
>> Tom Horsley wrote:
>>> I have tried to poke around in google for this before,
>>> but never found a satisfactory answer.
>>>
>>> Say I'm not running my own server, I don't have a domain name,
>>> i.e., a typical home computer.
>>>
>>> Can I configure sendmail to shuffle local mail around to
>>> local mailboxes, and take mail to external addresses
>>> sent by me and direct it to my ISP smtp server (which
>>> needs an SSL connection and user and password
>>> authorization).
>>>
>>> Or is there something that can act a lot like sendmail
>>> but is easier to configure to do this sort of thing?
>>>
>>
>> The short answer is that you can do what you want with sendmail. I
>> used to run my own mail server but it was too much of a pain. My ISP
>> doesn't allow servers to be run by users and some mail servers will
>> not accept
>
> snip...
>
>>
>> I like to run sendmail on my server as it allows me to use
>> spamassassin and MailScanner. Between these two programs I only see
>> one or two spam emails a week (hundreds are screened out and
>> discarded everyday). I
>
> How much good mail do you discard?
>
> I do not discard email in my mail systems. I refuse to accept it, or I
> filter suspected spam into users' spam folder. I have seen false
> positives - e*trade is stupid.
>
> I also have a rough filter that drops email that may contain suspect
> attachments into users' Windwoes folders.
>
I don't discard any good mail. In fact, I keep all email received for 2
weeks. After this period it's automatically discarded. Every few days
I do a quick check to ensure there haven't been any false positives. I
use a program to sort the emails by their spamassassin number. A pass
is anything below 5. Email between 5 and 6 is marked as possible spam
but delivered.
In several years I haven't seen a nonspam email above 10. A glance at
the subject and email sender is usually enough to verify it's really
spam. I white list those senders that we want but are normally flagged
as spam (eg. stock newsletters). I rarely blacklist since spammers
change/fake their ip's.
A nice feature of spamassassin is that it builds a database of what
should be considered spam. The more emails processed the more accurate
it becomes. Since this is my home system there are only a few users.
It's relatively easy to eliminate virtually all spam.
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