FreeBSD & SPAM

[David Landgren]

Robert Huff wrote:

> Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg writes:
> 
> 
>> SpamAssissin can hog a lot of CPU if you handle a lot of emails,
>> so make sure you are running it in daemon mode, that helps quite
>> a bit.
> 
> 
> 	SpamAssassin is Perl, so of ourse it's a hog.  I seem to
> remember someone trying to write a version in C ....

Well, they'll still be trying in 2007...

BNy the time you've written the current SA in C, the current Perl 
version will be miles ahead. Programmer productivity is always more 
important than raw power. A 2.8MHz Pentium Xeon with 2Gb RAM doesn't 
cost all that much and offers phenomenal processing power.

If that's not an option, an effective method for reducing SA load is 
to feed it less email :)

I use Postfix and have some pretty extensive correlation checks to 
filter out spam (spoofed sender domains, garbage HELO strings, 
obsolete or spambait recipients, spammer hosts). Since the beginning 
of the month these low-overhad checks blocked 5313 messages of 19990 
total. That's 5300 less that have to be dealt with SA.

To learn more about blocking spam with Postfix, 
http://www.securitysage.com/guides/postfix_uce.html is a good place to 
start these days.

David