PUBLIC MARKS with tags spam & server

MAGIC-SMTPD is a drop in replacement for Dan Bernsteins qmail-smtpd, and was originally designed to be part of the LinuxMagic Magic Mail Server. This OpenSource version has been released to allow others to benefit from it's anti-spam components, and valid user checking to reduce server loads and spam volumes. It is designed to support stock qmail installations, qmail/vpopmail installations, as well as having database support. Designed for ISP service, this will work for all mail servers large and small. Comments are welcome. Support for other mailers is expected in the future. Complete support packages are also available.

smtp-delay is an add-on/plug-in intended for use with qmail. It was written primarily to add banner delays and antipipelining to qmail. These two features are known to be able to block certain types of spam and virus mail sent through non-rfc-compliant SMTP engines. When I looked around for programs to add this functionality to qmail, I found only one such program, and didn't like the way it was done. BTW...I have the same objections to the way its done in sendmail 8.13.x. Since banner delays (the server pausing for some time before issuing an SMTP banner) cause every SMTP connection to take longer, I thought it would be a good idea to somehow exempt "legitimate" mail servers...or at least not subject them to long banner delays. So I decided to tune the banner delay time based on the connecting IP's reverse DNS. IPs with no rDNS get treated the worst (longest banner delay). IPs with rDNS matching a regex intended to detect dynamic/end-user IPs get a moderate delay. All other IPs get a very short banner delay...just long enough to see if they immediately pipeline (send SMTP commands before the banner's been sent). The original intent for smtp-delay was that it should be run before rblsmtpd, and simply set the RBLSMTPD environment variable if applicable, letting rblsmtpd issue the 4xx response. Pretty early on, I realized smtp-delay should be able to run standalone (without dependence on rblsmtpd to do its talking) and issue a 4xx response on its own. Lately, the spam load against our mail cluster has gotten so bad that I've started running smtp-delay after rblsmtpd, based on the idea that there's no point waiting out a long banner delay holding an open socket to an IP we have no intention of accepting mail from anyway. This reduced our concurrency by about 20%.

Filtering add-ons to specific mail server applications and instructions on how to filter spam with specific servers. Remember that spam filters are also available that work with any mail server on a particular operating system, and that some spam filters can be found that function on any operating system, with any mail server.

spamdyke is a filter for monitoring and intercepting SMTP connections between a remote host and a qmail server. Spam is blocked while the remote server (spammer) is still connected; no additional processing or storage is needed.

This guide describes how to set up a full email solution in Debian Linux (all code is from Debian Etch). I was asked to design a secure, scalable, portable solution for a small company. While the guide references many 'servers', the company only had 4 physical machines, Xen was used to virtualize the entire solution. That particular aspect of the system is not discussed in this guide, although I will try to get it into the next revision.

ESVA was born out of a need for organisations to have a cost-effective email virus & spam scanning solution. There are other commercial products out there, but these are often too expensive for small organisations to justify, or the existing free products are beyond the abilities of these organisations. ESVA is simply a pre-built and semi-configured email scanning (security) Virtual Appliance (ESVA) that will run on VMware Workstation, Server, Player or ESX Server. The idea is for the appliance to be pretty much set & forget with an easy to use interface so that users don't really need to know how to use the underlying GNU/Linux.

DSPAM is a scalable and open-source content-based spam filter designed for multi-user enterprise systems. On a properly configured system, many users experience results between 99.5% - 99.95%, or one error for every 200 to 2000 messages. DSPAM supports many different MTAs and can also be deployed as a stand-alone SMTP appliance. For developers, the DSPAM core engine (libdspam) can be easily incorporated directly into applications for drop-in filtering (GPL applies; commercial licenses are also available).

What is Greylisting? Greylisting is a new method of blocking significant amounts of spam at the mailserver level, but without resorting to heavyweight statistical analysis or other heuristical (and error-prone) approaches. Consequently, implementations are fairly lightweight, and may even decrease network traffic and processor load on your mailserver.