[BNM] SpamAssasin

[Guy Tierney]

Ahh bum - I'm sure someone was telling me about a plugin to deal
specifically with these! Hopefully the digest readers will have some
thoughts but thanks Pete for your thoughts so far.
Gt



on 2/2/07 1:54 pm, Pete Dowdell at bnm at stridebird.com wrote:

> Guy Tierney wrote:
>> Ok I get most of that but SpamAssasin here is pretty crappy - it totally is
>> missing those nasty penny stocks ones (that have a GIF attached with
>> squiggly lines on) and generally is pretty poor so we enquired about
>> upgrading it. This are the responses from out techies...
>>   
> 
> That's the next level of armament in the war...and it is very hard to
> filter this new generation of spam, as the content you need to scan is
> embedded in the image, and the rest of the mail is just a container,
> shaped to make it as slippery as possible for the filter.
> 
> The main defence against this type of spam is black lists.  In my
> experience I see the an hour or two of life of a new spam source like
> that before it is listed and thereafter canned by SA.
> 
> The only other measure afaik is OCR: this is technically do-able but the
> performance hit on the mail server is huge.  This also introduces a new
> arms race in the same vein as captcha filters as spammers make the
> embedded text hard for OCR processing.
> 
> If you can find a good 3rd parth spam filter relay solution, that sounds
> best for you.  This would only require a change to the MX field of your
> domain DNS and some configuration of your mail client to filter the
> forwarded mail - fairly painless stuff.  If you do decide to go this
> way, do report back I would be very interested to hear about your
> experiences.
> 
> Pete
> 
> 
>> "I've checked what version of spam assassin is on some of our other more
>> recently set up plesk servers and on the most recent version of plesk this
>> is running spam assassin version 3.0.6 however this is also on a different
>> operating system. In the last year we have moved from using freeBSD to
>> fedora core 4 because whilst freeBSD is a very robust operating system we
>> have found recently that plesk support for different versions of plesk
>> requires different versions of the freeBSD operating system because of this
>> I wouldn't recommend upgrading the version of plesk because the most recent
>> version of plesk has versions for freeBSD 4.11, 5.5, and 6.1 and the version
>> your server tomcat is at is 5.3.
>> I'm not sure if it is possible to just upgrade the spam assassin component I
>> have emailed our software vendors to ask if this is possible if it is not I
>> will ask if any of the above versions of plesk 8.1 are compatible with
>> freeBSD 5.3.
>> --------- 
>> I've had a response back from plesk, it's not possible to upgrade spam
>> assassin without upgrading plesk as the 2 pieces of software are very
>> heavily integrated. I'm waiting a further email to find out from SWSoft
>> which specific o/s version of plesk is compatible with the o/s on your
>> current server."
>> 
>> 
>> So my partners are thinking of outsourcing or spam filtering to a company
>> that is doing very well on tests but it seems silly when we have the tools
>> (although maybe not the knowledge yet) to deliver this in-house.
>> 
>> Does that help explain the situation?
>> Gt
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> on 2/2/07 1:15 pm, Pete Dowdell at bnm at stridebird.com wrote:
>> 
>>   
>>> Guy Tierney wrote:
>>>     
>>>> I was chatting recently (read autumn) with someone about SpamAssasin and
>>>> the
>>>> plug-ins involved to help it do its job properly as the the product itself
>>>> isn't much cop alone.
>>>> 
>>>> We're running Plesk on our Tomcat server so it seems to be an obvious
>>>> choice. 
>>>> 
>>>> Can anyone point me in the direction of how to get the best from this
>>>> software and or where to get these plug-ins - I may have completely the
>>>> wrong end of the stick not being a techie so go easy on me and the tech
>>>> speak ;D
>>>>   
>>>>       
>>> You're not holding the stick in the right place at least...! ;)
>>> 
>>> SpamAssasin : spam filtering system that operates when mail is received
>>> on a mail server
>>> Plesk: web-based control panel for site hosting
>>> Tomcat: a JSP application
>>> 
>>> To use spamasssasin you need it enabled on a mail server that handles
>>> your mail: either as the destination server or more sophisticatedly as a
>>> relay server.  It will label all mail filtered with a spam score, and
>>> you then configure your mail server and/or mail client to take the
>>> appropriate action according to the additional labelling spamassasin has
>>> applied to the message.
>>> 
>>> Sooo, plesk may be able to help you but I doubt it.  Tomcat isn't part
>>> of the equation at all.
>>> 
>>> Pete
>>> 
>>> PS...SA is a great system that is remarkably good at labelling spam.
>>> YMMV however, depending on configuration of your email hosting.  SA does
>>> multiple things to assess messages: black lists, bayes filtering,
>>> structure analysis etc.  But on a regular linux-y type environment, it
>>> should just work (and well) straight after install without much faff.
>>> phaff.  faf. 
>>>     
>> 
>> 
>>   
>