[BlueOnyx:02148] Re: ClamAV Spamassassin Milters

[Greg Kuhnert]

Hi Phil.

Phil Hamer wrote:
> I want to use the Milters!
>
> Its mailscanner I want to avoid.

There are lots of spam strategies that people use to manage spam. The 
strategy that I personally like is to run milters at the "front door" to 
get rid of the easy stuff first. On my own mailservers, 80-90% of spam 
is blocked by a spamassassin milter.

Blocking stuff that is "definitely" spam is easy to do at this level, 
but, the real problem is how to manage the mail that gets through the 
first layer? What do you do with mail that is "possibly spam"?

Let me give you an example. An end user calls you asking about mail that 
they did not receive. What do you do? With mailscanner/mailwatch as an 
inner layer, you can direct your user to have a look in the mailwatch 
database. This provides a self-service portal that shows mail that has 
been quarantined. If they find their mail in there, they can "release" 
the mail from the quarantine.

Some people dont like mailscanner due to the CPU overhead it imposes. I 
agree with this statement, but I still use it. Since most spam is 
blocked at the front door, (before mailscanner), there is no extra CPU 
overhead for most spam that is deleted by the milter.  Yes, there is 
some overhead associated with this inner layer, but the results from the 
additional policy based filtering and the self-service user interface 
make it worthwhile in my opinion.

-- 
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