Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Overview of this book

As a busy administrator, you know Spam is a major distraction in todays network. The effects range from inappropriate content arriving in the mailboxes up to contact email addresses placed on a website being deluged with unsolicited mail, causing valid enquiries and sales leads to be lost and wasting employee time. The perception of the problem of spam is as big as the reality. In response to the growing problem of spam, a number of free and commercial applications and services have been developed to help network administrators and email users combat spam. Its up to you to choose and then get the most out of an antispam solution. Free to use, flexible, and effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam application. Its unique combination of power and flexibility make it the right choice. This book will now help you set up and optimize SpamAssassin for your network.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
SpamAssassin
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Introduction
Glossary

Configuring the Second Filter


Once another spam filter has been selected, it should be integrated into the existing email system. In this chapter, two configurations are discussed. In both cases, the additional spam filter will be used first, reducing the number of emails that reach SpamAssassin.

The two configurations considered here are to run the new mail filter on the existing machine, or to use an additional machine solely for running the new spam filter.

Using two machines gives an advantage in terms of raw processing power, but introduces an extra point of failure. Additionally, configuration may be far more complex. For disaster recovery or hot fail-over, the cost to add one machine is doubled.

The two approaches have different strengths and weaknesses. The decision should be made based on the current system load, and the backup/disaster recovery strategy in place.

Using a Single Machine

This is the simpler solution. The current MTA already accepts SMTP traffic, validates recipient names...