General questions regarding MS, SpamAssassin stuff

Jason Williams jwilliams at COURTESYMORTGAGE.COM
Fri Mar 12 23:13:51 GMT 2004


>I use two of those three options. I block using a couple of fairly
>conservative lists (relays.ordb.org and the combined spamhaus.org lists)
>and also do some other sender 'sanity' tests (FQN sender etc) then get
>SpamAssassin to do the rest using more aggressive lists like Spamcop
>etc).Ii work on the basis that it takes a lot to get on the Spamhaus
>list and the relays list checks before listing (Can't say fairer than
>that) so if a message is rejected from those it's better than 90% likely
>to be spam. The other lists just add to the spam score adding more
>weight to SpamAssassin's assessment.

Ahh, combining a couple. Sounds like it could be a nice combo.

>Many here seem to use F-Prot (including myself) which seems to work
>well. Just depends on how much you want to spend. Some products cost
>more, some less and l wouldn't want to call which is best. I read that
>over the last virus writing spree the CA product was not updated that
>fast but during that time most of the commercial products struggled to
>keep up :-(

F-Prot is one of the AV scanners I was looking at. Originally I was looking
for a daemonized version of a AV scanner, but I read that MS does not use
daemonized version's and I read why. Make's sense.
Is there any performance degradation by using a non-daemonized av server?


>You would do worse than look at the rules_du_jour extra rule sets for
>SA. Really caught a load of spam for me (And helped bayes learn faster)

Not familiar with that, but i'll have a looksy, see what I can find out.

>Bayes can self learn so you don't have to manually feed it. Obviously it
>can be faster and sometimes make a more accurate database if it's fed.

I'm curious about the Bayes learning system. Sounds like it can come quite
in handy.

One final question regarding MS and SA. Does MS call SA just like it does
with AV scanners? Or do I need to start SA (spamd for instance) first, and
then let MS find it?

For instance, I installed SA through the FreeBSD ports tree and it
installed a script that can be started manually or upon boot.
If not, the way to enable SA in mailscanner is to change 'no' to 'yes' in
the mailscanner.conf section where it asks if you want to use SA?

Thanks everyone.

Jason



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