Hello all. Does anyone have a pointer to some info on using SA
with sendmail? Rules etc would be welcome. I know how to gen a
cf etc. I am getting spammed to death!

Thanks.

The only constancy is change itself.
-- Fredrick P. Brooks, Jr.
------------------------------------------------------------ ---

On 8/28/2007 8:50 PM, roland wrote:
> Hello all. Does anyone have a pointer to some info on using SA with
> sendmail? Rules etc would be welcome. I know how to gen a cf etc. I
> am getting spammed to death!

"spamass-milter" is your friend.

Any milter to interface with SpamAssassin will do fine. I like the fact
that I can use an SQL DB to specify user settings.

I use "spamass-milter" because it will pass the full email address as
the user to SpamAssassin, unlike the previous milter that I was using.



Grant. . . .

In article <Lh4Bi.30871$RX.1953 [at] newssvr11.news.prodigy.net>,
roland <raw [at] morphius.brahmaloka.net> wrote:

> Hello all. Does anyone have a pointer to some info on using SA
> with sendmail?

There are many different approaches, and which you like is to some
extent a matter of taste. My favorite way is to use the MIMEDefang
milter and have it do the SA testing. MD is nice because it is
essentially a filtering framework rather than a a canned filter, so it
can hook into multiple different AV packages as well as SA and provides
a "put your perl here" interface for working with mail that lets you do
anything you feel the need to do and can write (or find) the perl to
implement. For example, I have implemented selective silent archiving
with MD code and have pre-SA absolute filtering of certain subject
patterns (notably: the Storm e-card garbage) so that some mail never
makes it to the rather heavy step of SA checking.

There is at least one other simpler milter strictly for SA and there are
ways to hook it into the delivery pipe instead of as a milter.

>Rules etc would be welcome. I know how to gen a
> cf etc. I am getting spammed to death!

The current default SA rules including the 'net' ruleset and SA's
implementation of Bayesian filtering with auto-learning are actually
quite good. There's also a big stack of 'aftermarket' rules at
http://www.rulesemporium.com/ but I can't speak to their quality. Some
people like them.

I'd also start with other steps before SA. The first is to use the
Spamhaus DNSBL's. In most cases, the Zen list (a combination of all
Spamhaus DNSBL's in one query) is a good choice, but you may need to
make sure you have AUTH working and bypassing it. If you are unwilling
or unable to work around a need to accept mail from random
residential/dynamic/consumer IP's with AUTH, using the combined SBL-XBL
is a slightly less effective option that shouldn't cause trouble for
much of anyone. Using the Sendmail GreetPause feature at a conservative
setting (e.g. 3000 ms) is also almost universally deployable, useful,
and harmless aside from the degree to which it requires you to be able
to handle greater concurrency. If SBL-XBL or Zen and GreetPause don't
clobber better than half of your spam, you have very strange spam. SA is
a great tool to do a 90% job on top of the 75% you can get from
lighter-weight tools, but using it exclusively might be more of a burden
than you really want.

--
Now where did I hide that website...

Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 8/28/2007 8:50 PM, roland wrote:
>> Hello all. Does anyone have a pointer to some info on using SA with
>> sendmail? Rules etc would be welcome. I know how to gen a cf etc. I
>> am getting spammed to death!
>
> "spamass-milter" is your friend.
>
> Any milter to interface with SpamAssassin will do fine. I like the fact
> that I can use an SQL DB to specify user settings.
>
> I use "spamass-milter" because it will pass the full email address as
> the user to SpamAssassin, unlike the previous milter that I was using.
>
>
>
> Grant. . . .
>
Thanks for the hint. Bits are flying now. (downloading)

On 8/29/2007 8:51 PM, roland wrote:
> Thanks for the hint. Bits are flying now. (downloading)

You are welcome. Glad that I could help.



Grant. . . .

Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 8/29/2007 8:51 PM, roland wrote:
>> Thanks for the hint. Bits are flying now. (downloading)
>
> You are welcome. Glad that I could help.
>
>
>
> Grant. . . .
>
Just wanted to thank you again about your spamass-milter tip. Installed
it all and it's scary how quiet my mailbox is now. I am on several
mailing lists etc. No problems there. Also installed webuserprefs-0.6
which is working great! All this time I was suffering with spam. Now
I am a happy++ camper. Spamassasin is my hero 8^). I am impressed.

On 09/08/07 11:34, roland wrote:
> Just wanted to thank you again about your spamass-milter tip.
> Installed it all and it's scary how quiet my mailbox is now. I am on
> several mailing lists etc. No problems there. Also installed
> webuserprefs-0.6 which is working great! All this time I was
> suffering with spam. Now I am a happy++ camper. Spamassasin is my
> hero 8^). I am impressed.

Good.

Indeed properly configured milters will help reduce the amount of spam
that you get tremendously!

Enjoy your newly re-found spam free email freedom. :)



Grant. . . .