More information...

[Jennifer Fountain <jf...@rbinc.com>]

Hi Guys,
Thank you for the wonderful responses yesterday.  I had another question
- does anyone use tmda with SA http://tmda.net/>? I am thinking about
giving it a try but I do use qmail and relay it to my exchange box.  I
am not sure if this will work like I want it to.

Any thoughts?


Kind Regards,

Jennifer Fountain
3400 E. Walnut Street
Colmar, PA 18915

Re: More information...

[Jonathan Tai <jo...@tgpsolutions.com>]

On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 07:51, Jennifer Fountain wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> Thank you for the wonderful responses yesterday.  I had another question
> - does anyone use tmda with SA http://tmda.net/>? I am thinking about
> giving it a try but I do use qmail and relay it to my exchange box.  I
> am not sure if this will work like I want it to.
> 

I used to set SA to a very low threshold (like 1.0 or so) and invoke
TMDA on messages that were tagged as spam.  It was a pretty decent
setup, except:

TMDA generated a lot of return traffic; TMDA works by sending out
bounces, but in the case of spammers the return address is usually
invalid in one way or another.  My outgoing queue regularly had
thousands of bounces waiting to go out; 95%+ were TMDA bounces.  

SA + TMDA took a long time to deliver messages (compared to just
straight Maildir delivery).  At peak loads, my mail server would accept
a lot of mail off the wire and queue it internally for delivery.  Since
qmail's queue is just that - a queue, all new incoming mail would be
backlogged for several hours while SA + TMDA did its thing.  

This problem doesn't happen when using qmail-scanner because scanning is
done at queue time.  qmail doesn't send back a response code to the
sending SMTP until after clam/SA is done running.  The *sending* server
is made to wait; my server doesn't go down in flames.  

I had TMDA's pending queue set up to be invisible to my users, but if I
want to use Bayes, I need to have a "Spam" folder for them to drop
uncaught spam into.  So it's simpler (and *so* much easier to explain to
the users) to have tagged spam go into the "Spam" folder, and if SA
misses one, put it in there for SA to learn for next time.  

HTH.  

- Jon

-- 
jon@tgpsolutions.com

Administrator, tgpsolutions
http://www.tgpsolutions.com