Anti Spam

[jdow]

From: "Grant Peel" <gpeel at thenetnow.com>

Hi all,

I am posting this question here because I know there are alot of ISPs using 
FreeBSD (including me) and am hoping to get feedback, either directly to me 
or to the list.

We are wrestling (as I am sure many are), with spam. Up until now we have 
been employing Spamassassin locally and using some 3rd party Anti-Spam 
servervices that are getting less and less reliable as the weeks go by.

We are considering two hardware solutions, Easyantispam and Barracuda. 
Barracuda is very expensive, so the most likely candidate is Easyantispam. 
Does anyone out there have thought on either or both of these? Usability? 
Reliability? Total Cost of ownership? Integration issues?

Any thoughts will be appreciated,

-Grant




For what it is worth I have not heard any good words about Barracuda on
the SA mailing list. I have encountered a considerable number of people
who agree with Barracuda's detractors.

One of the good tools for SpamAssassin is the new FuzzyOCR plugin - IF
you can spare the CPU cycles.

Per user Bayes filtering and rules will always work better chiefly because
of the goose/gander problem - one person's spam is often another person's
ham.

Greylisting is a great tool for ISPs as long as you use a tool that "learns"
which addresses are real and which are not. In this regard carefully chosen
block lists can also be a great help. When applied, either in SA or in the
MTA, use a scoring system with the block lists so that one agressive list
will not suddenly irritate customers with lost important messages.

{^_^}    Joanne