Server-side open source anti-spam solutions

>My total messages for October peaked at just under 10,000 across all
>accounts (obviously, this is mostly mailing lists).
>
>I'm running SpamAssassin 3.0.0 with bayes.

Unfortunately server-side tools don't scale that well. One of our
four mail servers has handled over 250,000 messages in the past 60
hours. Given that load I'm more than happy to offload the filtering
to another system. When you add the connection-intensive inbound
SMTP, plus the usual background noise of harvest attacks, worm
backscatter, and bounces, pile on some filtering load... overall
server performance starts to suffer and users complain. Trust me,
nothing freaks users out more than a SLOW mail server. They can
handle it being *down* better than it being slow... go figure.

The real benefit of Postini from my perspective is that we can
effectively hide our mailservers from the world, letting Postini's
multiple processing clusters bear the brunt of the onslaught. This
lets our servers perform what they were designed to do: handle mail
for our clients.

For smaller ops, with modest loads, SpamAssasin is *excellent*... I
know because I've used it. I've also heard very good things about the
Barracuda "spam firewall". Like Adam said, Postini is by no means the
Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem.

Regards,
--

Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
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At 11:36am Nov 3, 2004, Lewis Butler wrote:

>I'm running SpamAssassin 3.0.0 with bayes. All the spams I received
>were Nigerian variants of some sort, which quickly got learned by my
>filters.

Yes it's nice to have an open source solution available-I'm going
that route myself on my own server.

The problem with using something like SpamAssassin is that
configuring it properly usually requires familiarity and comfort with
the command line, specifically the command line of whatever Unix-like
server you happen to have sufficient access to, along with having to
acquire some knowledge of how to configure your anti-spam solution.
It won't be the point-and-click option of a service like Postini.

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