[SDBUG] OpenBSD's "spamd" usable on FreeBSD?

[Miles Teg]

You're trying to get your ISP to use this software?  hah!

Considering spam is often sent with legitimate SMTP engines, you aren't 
going to get that much spam filtering out of it, so I fail to see how you 
can justify the corresponding 3-5 minute delay in email service.  If my ISP 
took 3-5 minutes to get emails to my inbox, I would switch services.  If it 
somehow blocked all spam, it might be worth it, but anyone using a subverted 
or open 3rd party SMTP server as their relay is going to wait the 3-5 
minutes and send you the email again.

Allow me to recommend in its place, a Barracuda Spam Firewall.  This 
"black-box" solution is a Linux box running quite a combination of anti-spam 
technologies, including but certainly not limited to SpamAssassin.  With one 
of these in place at our business, which has some 10 year old email 
addresses that get spammed like there's no tomorrow, I can't recall the last 
time I saw a spam email get through untagged.  I used to run my own setup 
with RBL lists (which the barracuda has), spam assassin with updated rule 
sets, my own custom filters that I would maintain, everything I could think 
of.  And it was a huge waste of time.  The effectiveness was mostly limited 
to spamassassin and the rbls, and while I was able to take quite a chunk out 
of spam, maybe 70%, it didn't even come close to what the barracuda 
achieves.  And now, it's someone else at Barracuda spending their time 
tuning the damned thing instead of me.  It also has anti-virus filtering 
built in.  Since I have installed this unit, complaints about spam have gone 
to 0, email viruses infecting my office network have gone to 0, and 
complaints about false positives have gone to 0.

I do not own stock in, nor am I a reseller for, nor am I affiliated in any 
way with Barracuda, I am just very satified with their anti-spam firewall 
product.  I also use their anti-spyware firewall which uses a squid based 
web proxy to filter phishing and spyware sites and downloads.  Both of these 
products are based on open source solutions, with the added value of having 
the Barracuda people tune and update the rules and tests for the products 
constantly.  The units are updated by Barracuda very often, sometimes 
hourly.  The price for the units depends on the size of the unit you need, 
but I got the smallest ones and they still handle the traffic easily and 
handle multiple domains.  The yearly cost for the service on the anti-spam 
firewall is like $1500 a think, which I spent *way* more than $1500 of my 
time per year working on filtering spam, searching for lost false positives, 
and removing viruses and spyware from my office lan.

If you're a business owner or IT administrator at any mid-sized business, I 
have to recommend the Barracuda anti-spam product.

http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Leftwich" <Hostmaster at Video2Video.Com>
To: "SDBUG" <SDBug at SDBug.Org>
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 5:37 PM
Subject: [SDBUG] OpenBSD's "spamd" usable on FreeBSD?


> Has anyone used "spamd" on FreeBSD?  I'm trying to get my ISP to use it.
>
> If I understand it correctly, it is a sendmail clone, but with one major 
> difference (improvement?) -- incoming messages are told, "Hollld on a sec, 
> let me see if I can deliver your message, please wait 3-5 minutes then try 
> back."  And if the incoming message is a spammer, then THEIR side of the 
> sending gives up and does not legitimately retry.
>
> The sacrifice is only that the recipient cannot receive a message 
> immediately.
>
> But, sounds great!
>
> --
> Peter Leftwich, Owner
> Video2Video Services
> Box 13692, La Jolla, CA, 92039, USA
> http://Www.Video2Video.Com
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