nanog mailing list archives

Re: Spam filtering bcps


From: Matthew Sullivan <matthew () sorbs net>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 09:56:12 +1000


Bryan Bradsby wrote:

Silently deleting other people's e-mail should never even be considered.

Unless that email is a virus, or a spam with a forged envelope sender.
Why? - You can scan for viruses inline using a variety of products (eg: I have patched Postfix to use clamav inline on modest hardware (single CPU AMD64 will do it, so will a Dual PIII 866) and it will accept messages at 50 messages per second (sustained load) and scan for viruses before responding to the end-of-data command, rejecting if a virus is detected.).

Spam is a different subject altogether - are you that sure you can detect spam without a false positive? If so then why aren't you doing it inline? If you can't why are you blindly deleting the messages? - My BCP comment is if you can't detect inline (eg for performance reasons) tag it and deliver it (if you have the capabilities, deliver it to a junk folder) - that way you are following the RFC's and no non spam mail is deleted by the system.

Regards,

Mat


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