a new sendmail question

[Gerry Doris]

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.