Re: Spam Solution

["Kurt Buff" <kurt.buff () gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Jay <jayvanguy () gmail com> wrote:
> Hi There,
>
>  I am just sending an e-mail out there to you all to find thoughts out
>  there on a good Spam solution to possibly use for an enterprise.
>  Would like to hear positive points and pain points on some solutions
>  out there from you all if you have the time.
>
>  Thanks

We use Maia Mailguard. I find that it's outstanding at blocking
spam/viruses for our ~300 person company. It's mostly a fork of
amavisd-new, with much added functionality. As such, it coordinates
SpamAssassin, ClamAV (and other AV engines if you use them) and
potentially other tools. I run it over Postfix, on a FreeBSD box.

In particular, I like its web interface, which allows users to mark
mail as ham/spam for individual Bayesian learning, and rescue any spam
that the system quarantines. I also mark a large list of attachments
as dangerous, and mail containing any of them is also quarantined, and
can be rescued through the web interfaces.

For further convenience, individuals can set it to send reminders at a
user-specified interval, so that they know to visit the web site
occasionally. For me personally, it's over 99% accurate in
discriminating between ham and spam, though for the user population as
a whole it's close to 94% accurate.

I've learned a lot in setting it up and maintaining it - I consider my
FreeBSD skills fair to good, not expert - and the solution is somewhat
complex, as you're going to manage a fair number of moving parts,
including installing MySQL or PostgreSQL, php, pear, Maia itself,
SpamAssassin, ClamAV, the MTA of your choice, the OS of your choice,
perl and a few other things, then doing the usual security updates
when those come out, but overall it's been extremely stable and easy
to manage.

One last thing: Support from the mailing list has been excellent -
it's a good community.

Kurt