Integrating MailScanner, SpamAssasin and Exchange

[Walter D. Wyndroski]

The reason I have my MX records operating in that manner is if our Linux box
has a hardware failure, we can simply open up the Prmary MX in the firewall
thus having untinerrupted email service. My Linux mailserver did suffer a
major hardware failure last week (which sucked). However, I was able to
quickly restore email service without any extraordinary measures until I
could get the machine replaced.

Curiously, I have followed at least a dozen posts on this subject since I
last replied. I have a question regarding the original integration issue
which was posed. Are you specifically wanting all the spam control in
Outlook using filters based on the SpamAssassin score? If not, you should
really look into www.tmda.net . TMDA offers built-in integration with
SpamCop. Besides, you could still use all of the power of SpamAssassin to
mark what is most likely spam. TMDA is open-source and written in Python
(even though I am Perl man myself :) ) and is free! TMDA will virtually
block 100% of unwanted spam and take the burden off of the admin. Anyway,
it's not my product, and I didn't help write. But it works really well. I
tested it for 2 months as a trial and received no spam whatsoever.

I know this is the MailScanner list, and I am a proud user of Mailscanner on
every single Linux mailserver I operate (3 btw). However, I just wanted to
pass along a really great open-source solution to help the fight against
spam. Maybe I won't get flamed for this. :)

Walt Wyndroski


----- Original Message -----
From: "Hirsh, Joshua" <joshua.hirsh at PARTNERSOLUTIONS.CA>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 8:16 AM
Subject: Re: Integrating MailScanner, SpamAssasin and Exchange


> > Anway, I have my Linux box set as secondary MX and my
> > Exchange server as
> > primary MX. Both are behind the firewall. I have primary MX
> > inaccessible to
> > Internet, that way all mail falls to the secondary MX.
>
>  IMHO, this is probably not a very good way to go about doing this. In the
> majority of cases, each email that's sent to one of your users will first
> try to reach the unreachable primary MX and then fail to the secondary.
The
> best way this should be done is to leave the Linux box as your primary
(and
> in this case, only) MX. On the Linux box you would have your domains set
to
> relay, and use transport maps to redirect them to your Internal server.
>
>
>  On the whole MS/SA/Exchange subject, we make use of the Outlook client
> rules to let the users decide what they want to do with low scoring spam.
In
> newer versions of Outlook (2000+, possibly 98 too) you can easily setup
> rules to match on the X-MailScanner-SpamScore header, and based on the
score
> do whatever the user wants. In Outlook 97 you need to install a plug-in to
> get the enhanced rules filtering (which has been known to cause problems
in
> some cases).
>
>  Other than explaining to each user how to setup the rule properly, this
is
> probably the easiest solution and won't involve alot of admin time to read
> through each spam in a public folder and forward it on. I don't know about
> everyone else, but I'd rather not spend my day reading other peoples spam
;)
>
>  John's suggestion is good too, but would probably also be a bit time
> consuming to setup.
>
>
>  Cheers,
>
> --
> Joshua Hirsh
> Systems Administration
> Partner Solutions/ING Canada
> PGP/GnuPG ID: 0xD12A3B59
>
>
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* concerning MailScanner, visit http://www.mailscanner.info                                  *
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