[K12OSN] OT: just reduced spam by 95% with Free Software

[Nils Breunese]

Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:

> Nils Breunese wrote:
>> Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
>>
>>> I will first admit that this is somewhat off-topic from K12LTSP.
>>> That said, schools could benefit from this.  This is definitely
>>> applicable for those of you who asked about using K12LTSP as an  
>>> email
>>> server for your students.
>>>
>>> We all know about the spam problem.  Well, over this last week, I
>>> have been playing with OpenBSD's spamd as a possible solution.
>>> Basically, I put the spamd box in front of my (yes, GNU/Linux) email
>>> server.  I have now reduced the spam count in my inbox from close to
>>> 200 a day down to...five.  FIVE.  This is without false  
>>> positives.  I
>>> have verified that by studying my spamd logs all week and comparing
>>> them to my real email server's logs.
>>>
>>> For those of you with small pipes to the Internet, this is
>>> *definitely* something you might want to consider.  It saves you  
>>> some
>>> bandwidth.
>>>
>>> If anyone's interested, let me know.
>>
>> If your K12LTSP server can handle it, why not just run spamd  
>> (which is
>> just the SpamAssassin daemon, right?) on your K12LTSP server  
>> directly?
>> I don't think there is a difference between OpenBSD's spamd and  
>> Fedora
>> Core's spamd, is there?
>
> Good question.  Actually, there is a big difference, and a lot of  
> people
> confuse OpenBSD's spamd with that of SpamAssassin, since the name  
> of the
> executable happens to be the same.  They are in fact different  
> programs
> with different strategies of dealing with spam.  They are not
> replacements for each other; rather, they are complements.

Ah, I found it [0]. Looks like 'just a collection of blacklists'. I'm  
not sure I'd setup a separate box with another OS just for that  
(different if you're familiar with OpenBSD), but yes, you might want  
to offload the load that filtering spam takes to another box if your  
K12LTSP needs all its power to serve your thin clients.

I don't have a K12LTSP server at the moment, but I use SpamAssassin  
with dcc [1], pyzor [2] and razor [3] to fight spam on my servers  
(running Plesk with qmail as MTA) which works nicely. You could add  
MAPS zones (like spamhaus.org's zen.spamhaus.org, etc.) as blocklists  
or plug them into SpamAssassin for extra scoring, but make sure you  
know which ones you're using and why (they all have different  
policies and some include others). Also, make sure to keep your list  
of zones up to date, because a MAPS zone that no longer exists can  
delay your mail delivery pretty bad.

If you happen to run servers running Plesk check out  
atomicrocketturtle.com's free Project Gamera [4] if you'd like to  
setup a dedicated spam and virus filtering gateway.

Nils Breunese.

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/
[1] http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
[2] http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://razor.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/Joomla/content/view/77/29/
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