Integrating MailScanner, SpamAssasin and Exchange

[Nicholas Esborn]

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I recently rolled MS/SA out to my company (~1300 users), with the stated
requirement that no business mail could be lost.

My solution was to rewrite the destination address on spam from
user at domain.com to user at spam.domain.com, which then gets delivered to
a seperately maintained (Linux) mail server, running a webmail.  We
used Winbind to provide login information, and I wrote some scripts
to maintain unix config files from the Exchange directory.

It seems to work pretty well.  From the webmail, users can identify
false positives, which then get sent to their normal INBOXes.  The
system sends out a nightly summary of new junk mail, so users don't
just forget about the webmail (and thus lose the aforementioned business
mail).

All this complexity came about because there appears to be no reliable
way to push policy or rules to Outlook.  We weren't going to guide
1300 users through creating an Outlook rule to match the MailScanner
headers.  Basically after looking at the Outlook-side integration
options, we decided that none of them were acceptable.

I suppose we could have scripted the creation of per-user Spam folders
in Exchange, and then added vbscripts to recognize the MailScanner headers
and divert the spam accordingly, but that adds a lot of per-mail trans-
actional overhead, which bogs Exchange down very quickly.

Hope this helps,

- -nick

On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 06:01:13PM -0700, Greg Boehnlein wrote:
> Hello,
>         We have been using the combination of Mailscanner and
> SpamAssasin
> for quite a while now with great success. What a great set of tools!
> I've
> contributed what I can over the years, however minor that may be, but I
> am
> always quick to point out Mailscanner as an example of an extremely well
> built and flexible open source project. It solves many of the problems
> that the so called "Enterprise MTAs" can't effectively solve on their
> own!
> ;)
>         Recently, I have been asked by a client to try and intergrate a
> MailScanner + SpamAssasin front end with a Microsoft Exchange server
> backend. The client wants mail passing through the MS+SA server to be
> tagged with a header (simple) that identifies possible spam and then
> having the Exchange server review that header and dump the mail to a
> Spam
> folder for later review.
>         This is pitifully easy to do with procmail, by looking at the
> Spam-Score header, but for all of the documentation I can find on
> Exchange, I can find absolutely no method for doing this. Has anyone
> done
> this on Exchange, or is there some other obvious way to make Exchange
> throw out mail that is tainted?
>
>
> --
>     Vice President of N2Net, a New Age Consulting Service, Inc. Company
>          http://www.n2net.net Where everything clicks into place!
>                              KP-216-121-ST

- --
Nicholas Esborn
Affymetrix, Inc.

510/428.8505

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