Use ISP-based Spam Assassin and local Fetchmail
Oct 05, '04 09:41:00AM
Contributed by: thirdpig
I just switched our ISP to Speakeasy, who use the Spam Assassin spam filter. I wanted to have them pre-filter our mail. I listed them as the only mail exchangers for our domain. I then used Fetchmail to transfer the messages via POP3 to my server's mail transfer agent (MTA), Postfix. The benefits are:
- Greatly reduced load on my server. No more handling all the domain email traffic (and the mountains of spam that clog up our 768K dsl line)
- I don't have to monkey with configuring Spam assassin.
- I don't have to monkey with configuring a vacation message module- that's built-in to the Speakeasy webmail interface.
- When my server is down, we use Speakeasy webmail as a fallback.
So far I am very happy with the performance, and people have found navigating the spam settings and auto-reply features on the webmail interface easy to work with. Fetchmail 6.2.5 is already included in Panther 10.3.5, so you don't have to build it from scratch. Here are the instructions I followed for setting up Fetchmail. There is also some good info for workstation users here.
The only glitch I haven't figured out yet is that an account has to be logged in on the server to make it work. The file that tells Fetchmail what server to look for and what accounts to query (.fetchmailrc) has to be located at the root level of the the logged-in user's home folder. I also would like to prevent my server from responding to smtp requests from spammers who somehow know there is a mail server at my location, even though the mail exchangers make no mention of my server.
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