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SpamAssassin and Amavisd: Go Ninja On Your UBE Woes

Building a Better Gateway

September 9, 2004

The bad news is, it's SpamAssassin, not SpammerAssassin. The good news is it kills spam quite effectively, and fits nicely into an anti-spam, anti-virus gateway. This article, which shows how to use SpamAssassin with Postfix, is the first in a series on building an anti-spam and anti-virus gateway. This gateway works equally well for a single PC, or for a large network, and it's built of four components:

  • Postfix
  • SpamAssassin
  • Amavisd-new
  • ClamAV

Prerequisite: An existing Postfix server, that is running well and happily. The other bits are add-ons to Postfix. They work just fine with other mail transfer agents (MTAs) (define) like qmail, Exim, and Sendmail, but this series will center around Postfix.

You should also save yourself a batch of spams for testing.

But I Don't Run Windows

That's all right, you will still benefit from this. You can probably omit Clam Anti-Virus, and just use SpamAssassin.

I Confess, I Run Windows

If you run any Windows hosts, then by gosh you absolutely need this, every bit of it. Before investing time and energy in building this anti-spam/anti-virus gateway, do take some elementary precautions:

Remove:

  • Outlook
  • Outlook Express
  • Internet Explorer

Replace them with any of the following fine free email clients and Web browsers:

  • Eudora Mail
  • Pegasus Mail
  • Mozilla/Netscape Mail
  • Opera Mail
  • Opera Web Browser
  • Mozilla/Netscape Web Browser

You have now closed off the major malware ports of entry, and can move on to the next steps.

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