An Anti-Spam gateway #0: Introduction

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

“An Anti-Spam gateway” is the Tlog’s third series.

In it, I will write about how to use a Unix-like free operating system such as Linux or OpenBSD, using Postfix, amavisd-new, SpamAssassin with MySQL, and ClamAV to create a free, open source, efficient mail gateway, for tagging spam (I don’t believe in deleting it automatically, that should be up to the users themselves) and stopping email viruses.

While I plan to make this not too advanced, I won’t deal with the basics here, like the installation of the OS, or uncompressing files, and so on.

Also, I won’t explore all the alternatives. This is a HOWTO, not a reference manual. Think of it as a recipe: while a cook is free to change some of the ingredients or procedures, the recipe doesn’t usually say “if you do this instead, that will be the result”. For instance, you may not require an anti-virus, or may want to use a different one, or may want to delete spam messages above a certain score, or may not use MySQL for the Bayes database… all of those possibilities are perfectly fine. I just won’t explore them here.

I hope this series is useful. Few companies, except perhaps multinationals, have gateways as good as this one will be. Trust me. I may be missing out the money I could make by selling “consulting” to companies to do this, instead of just posting the information on the net; however, I don’t want to make a living of installing and configuring email gateways , and, also, if the majority of companies (and possibly even ISPs) adopt something like this, then there may be, in the future, less spam out there. Making the world a better place, and all that stuff. A guy can dream.