Book Image

Linux Email

Book Image

Linux Email

Overview of this book

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together. This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network. Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups. Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance. Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux E-mail
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 8. Busting Spam with SpamAssassin

Spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) as it is sometimes called, is the scourge of the Internet. Spam has increased relentlessly over the last ten years and now accounts for over half of all Internet bandwidth. One in six consumers have acted on spam e-mails, so there is a strong business case for keeping spam out of your users' inboxes. There are a variety of different spam solutions, ranging from outsourcing your spam entirely to no action at all. However, if you have your own e-mail server, you can add spam filtering very easily.

SpamAssassin is a very popular open source anti-spam tool. It won a Linux New Media Award-2006 as the "Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution", and is considered by many to be the best free, open source, anti-spam tool, and better than many commercial products. In fact, several commercial products and services are based on SpamAssassin or previous versions of it.

In this chapter, you will learn:

  • Why spam is difficult...