An Anti-Spam gateway #10: amavisd-new

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Go to the amavisd-new site and download the latest version (2.3.3 at the time of writing). Uncompress it somewhere, then copy amavisd to /usr/local/sbin (for instance), and amavisd.conf to /etc.

Edit the /etc/amavisd.conf file. Add the following lines to the end:

$daemon_user = 'amavis';
$daemon_group = 'amavis';
$mydomain = 'YOURDOMAIN'; # replace with your own domain, of course
$virus_quarantine_method = '';
$spam_quarantine_method = '';
$banned_files_quarantine_method = '';
$bad_header_quarantine_method = '';
$sa_tag_level_deflt = -202.0;
$sa_tag2_level_deflt = 8.31;
$sa_kill_level_deflt = 50;
$sa_dsn_cutoff_level = 50;
$mailfrom_notify_admin = "YOUR EMAIL"; # add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$mailfrom_notify_recip = "YOUR EMAIL"; # add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$mailfrom_notify_spamadmin = "YOUR EMAIL";# add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$final_virus_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_banned_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_spam_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_bad_header_destiny = D_PASS; # many badly configured servers out there
$warnvirusrecip = 1;
$warnbannedrecip = 1;

(a few lines may have wrapped around in the above. They all start with “$“)

Create the following directories, making sure they belong to user and group amavis:

/var/amavis/tmp
/var/amavis/var,
/var/amavis/db

Run amavisd, and check if it’s listening in port 10024. If not, there should be some error message telling you what the problem (in /etc/amavisd.conf) is.

We’re almost done, now. Next: configuring Postfix to work with amavisd-new.