Open Question: Can I Handle Spam Better Than My MIS Department?
 

First some background:

I sit in an office in city #1. The MIS group sits in an office in city #2. Our corporate email servers are not in my office, but up in the MIS office. I have about 35 users all running Windoze workstations. The users here have a huge spam problem. The MIS group does an "adequate" job of filtering viruses, but only uses simple subject line filtering (I think).

So, what I would like to do is set up a linux box here to be used as an E-mail gateway (NOT SERVER). Ideally it would sit Inside the LAN (behind firewall). If it must, it can be DMZ. All users have POP3 accounts. Anyway, I've done some looking around and found these:

CRM114 Discriminator SPAM filter

-and-

The DSPAM project

(Yes, I got these from a recent /. article)

I like the approach of them. The first one has some MicroShaft plugins available which would be good for my situation since that's what everyone uses here.

I'd like it so MIS up in city #2 doesn't have to do anything or even know about it. They wouldn't do anything if I asked (way too busy, and don't know jack about Linux). It has to be transparent to anyone either in this office of the MIS office.

My questions are thus:

1) Is this possible? Seems like it is. I would just like the gateway to look at emails, handle the "bad" ones in some configurable way, and pass along the "good" ones to the clients (on inbound) or server (on outbound)
2) What, in your opinion, would be the best suited distro for this?
3) Any general configuration recommendations?
4) Any software recommendations?

Any advice, opinions, comments, flames, will be appreciated.

Thanks,

-G-

Your looking at setting up an extra box between the firewall and the router - I think that you can't avoid your MIS department finding out.

Have you tried contacting the MIS dept to see if what they are using, maybe even write a business case to suggest your approach. Don't forget, if something goes wrong with your approach and you are not around to fix it, the MIS people will get involved. What are the penalties at your company for introducing strange, unknown kit on the network?

My advice is, go the slower route - you'll get less hassle in the long run.

Well, the answer would be first, "What the hell are you doing, and explain it layman's terms", then it would be "No way, No how. It's not M$ and we are starting our active directory roll out and you'll be getting a new server soon, so lay off, go back to being an engineer, and forget about computers because you are not a computer professional".

To that, I say "Nutz"

I was thinking I could deploy the box for just me, routing my email through it and back from it. Then slowly expand from there.

In general, regardless of the method I choose (tell MIS, don't tell MIS), I have to learn more about it. Any pointers you can throw me to that end?

-G-