Is spamassassin configurable and good enough to be used as a high end spam filter ?

I have followed some tutorials and cant get it as effective as the spam filter we use at the company I work for thats an all MS shop.

I would like to think "anything MS can do, Linux can do better" especially on the server side.

Any suggestions would be good. I am more curious then anything, but if I have an opportunity to promote Linux, I can and will and knowing this would help.

Spamassassin IS one of, if not, the best enterprise spam filter there is. Having a front end SMTP/SPAM/Anti-virus Linux server is how it is best done in Enterprises. You should never connect Exchange directly to the Internet, only as a back-end mailbox server.

You sound like some guys that I knew about four years ago. I worked with them at a Fortune 500 company and they where using Sun servers using sendmail as their front end for SMTP only, no spam and I don't think they did a good job of anti-virus, I have the bags under my eyes to prove it. Anyways, I told them about a better solution using Linux, Spamassassin and they laughed saying that it wasn't enterprise ready, that was in 2003. Man are they suckers. They should have a big MS branded to their nads like they do with cows.

Yes, you can scale a Linux/SPAM enterprise system like you would not believe.

Thanks.

Its looks like I need to do more research and more tweaking of my SA and Postfix install.

Thanks.

The other thing that I find useful is configuring Postfix to do greylisting and checking against various spam IP databases

www.freespamfilter.org has howtos for several distros on setting up a dedicated enterprise quality spamfilter. It covers not only SA and postfix, it additionally covers integrating Amavis_new, DCC, Pyzor, Razor and antivirus as well. We use a system like this at work as a mail gateway for our MS Exchange box and have had great success with it.

HTH

Mad.

thanks heaps for the info.

I have configured Pyzor and Razor on my SA install as well as checking against a few Databases. I have about an 8 sec process on average for an email, but I think its worth.

I still get about 10 spam emails a day in my own account, haven't done a system wide check. Admittedly it catches about 80 a day destined for me, but ~%10 of spam getting through, I thought it would need to be better for a enterprise level.

I'll just read some more.

Thanks

It comes down to playing around with discard scores, etc

I forgot to mention that we also use SA-Update along with OpenProtect's SpamAssassin update channel to add SA filter rules. With these rules in place we get virtually no spam at all.

Links:
http://saupdates.openprotect.com/

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/...fbe95e9e00d3b1

Mad.

Ok so I have my system back up to where it was before (DCC, Pyzor and Razor network testing and SARE rules updating with RulesDejour) and I still get about 8-10 spam emails a day. Admittedly it blocks about 80-90 a day, but still thats only a ~90% success rate. Is this good/normal ?

Our company just bought something from http://www.pineapp.com/ for fighting spam and it seems to do a better job unfortunately.

Did you try the greylisting? That stops a lot for me

Hmmm have considered that, but signing up for forums etc will then become a pain and then you have to weigh up which is more inconvenient.

Stick them in the bypass file if you want