John R Pierce wrote: > In the past I've used a combination of spamhaus combined RBL's and > Spamassassin with Mailscanner as my spam recipe, but this stopped > working very well for me well over a year ago. As many of the users of > the couple small/personal mail servers I run are NOT technical people, > and use POP to read their mail, 'training' spamassassin is difficult at > best. Once upon a time, using the Rules Du Jour scripts from the SARES > project worked pretty well, but that has been shut down, and really > hasn't been functional in over a year. > > I've just rebuilt a friends mail server with centos 5.2 (it was running > FC3 or something before) and would like to setup them up with a decent > anti-spam recipe that doesn't require extensive tinkering or training. > does anyone have a good recipe for this? Ideally I'd like something > purely RPM based that doesn't require extensive configuration and > tuning. I've never setup razor before, how well does that work if > the mail users aren't in a position to feed it training data? > John, I wrote the Wiki pages on Postfix with restrictions and greylisting here: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postfix_restrictions http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postgrey I've found this setup to be highly effective in filtering spam (~99.6%) without the need for any post-filtering such as SpamAssassin. Helo restrictions alone take out about a third of spam on my mail server and then I use the following RBL's: zen.spamhaus.org dnsbl-1.uceprotect.net, dnsbl-2.uceprotect.net, dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net, psbl.surriel.com, bl.spamcop.net, followed up by greylisting to catch the remainder. I've only seen a few false positives and they have mostly come from using the dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net RBL. If you don't want to be too aggressive, maybe drop this one from the list and see how you get on. The only other recommendation I would make is to avoid catchall accounts where ever you can and only accept mail for actual users. If you then still find you want to run SpamAssassin and/or ClamAV to filter the very small amount of spam that makes it through, check out this Wiki page: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Amavisd although I really haven't found the need to use any post-filtering with the above setup. Obviously the above is based on Postfix but equally applies to other MTA's. Regards, Ned