Building "Kenmore"

The amount of spam in my mbox has risen dramatically, and I've had multiple customers begging for me to find a way to make it stop. I implemented ORDB a long time ago, and though this helped, the spam is just overwhelming and getting worse.

So I'm building a standalone appliance for cleaning - ("kenmore" - sorry Sears) - and it's coming together nicely. It's built on the very cool Shuttle SS51G small-form-factor cabinet w/ motherboard (2GHz Pentium 4, 512M RAM). It's running Red Hat 7.2 with Postfix 2.0.3, and I spent my first time getting this working. Postfix 2 works a bit differently than the previous versions, so I had to brush up. I'm also very intersted in really understanding PostFix, so it's not good enough that the relaying work correctly - I have to know why. Postfix is great.

Then I added SpamAssassin in the "simple filter" mode - the messages are run synchronously through the filter, and it involves a full shell/perl process launch. So far it's working, and my spam is routed automatically to a separate folder on my Mozilla mail clinet. I do only tagging, not deleting.

Next steps:

• Get the spam daemon running to improve efficiency
• Get PostFix doing LDAP lookups so it can query the Exchange server before accepting inbound mail
• Create web interface for whitelist management
• Get this all documented for replication

But this is all very encouraging.

Posted by Steve at February 11, 2003 09:54 AM | TrackBack