scanning on both primary and second MX servers

[Julian Field]

On 2 May 2006, at 00:20, Logan Shaw wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> I've been working on setting up MailScanner at the site where
> I admin (previously we had no spam filtering at all), and so
> far I've got it working pretty well on the main mail server.
> We have a backup MX server (which we control) as well, but I
> hadn't set up MailScanner on that machine at all; I made the
> decision that it wasn't necessary based on the fact that all
> that mail will eventually go through the MailScanner machine
> anyway, so it should be able to do all the filtering.
>
> Now I've reached the point where I think realtime blacklisting
> needs to be part of our spam solution.  I set it up on our
> primary mailserver (which receives via SMTP, runs MailScanner,
> and also is the POP3/IMAP server), and everything seems OK,
> except for one thing:  the realtime blacklisting doesn't do
> squat to filter out spams that hit our backup MX server first.
> The reason is fairly obvious:  on our MailScanner machine,
> the mail appears to be coming from a host that's OK, whereas
> on the backup MX machine, there is no blacklisting.
>
> So, I thought I had a solution:  install MailScanner on the
> backup MX as well.  Then blacklisting will be in effect over
> there, and everything's great, theoretically.  I installed all
> that, and just now I realized the flaw in that plan.  I now
> get two sets of headers because the messages are being scanned
> twice by two different machines.  (I get "X-Spam-Status: Yes,
> Yes" and stuff like that.)

What I would advise is that you install SpamAssassin (used as part of  
MailScanner, download by "easy-to-install" package of ClamAV+SA from  
the MailScanner downloads page). You can then not only assign your  
own scores to different RBLs if you want to, but more importantly  
SpamAssassin will check all the hosts through which the message  
passed, not just the last hop (which is all MailScanner can do).

SpamAssassin is much better than MailScanner with this feature.

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store
PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654


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