Need advice for setting up mail server

[Doug Hardie]

> On 7 August 2016, at 11:01, Niklaas Baudet von Gersdorff <me at niklaas.eu> wrote:
> 
> What I can highly recommend is mail/spamd. I learned about it in
> the FreeBSD Handbook. However, documentation there seems a bit
> old so it's not longer correct. Spamd offers greylisting too but,
> as mentioned above, there are reasons not to enable that.
> However, you can also run it in blocking mode solely. This way it
> collects updated entries on malicious hosts that you can pipe to
> PF and block with your firewall. Very resource-friendly. Read
> spamd(8) for how to configure it properly (and don't trust the
> handbook on it).

I am running spamd (obspamd last time I checked) on the mail server for a medium sized ISP.  It has never worked the way the documentation describes.  However, it has been useful.  When I first installed it, around 90% of the email being received was dropped.  It blocks drive-by spammers who don't queue and retry on TMP_FAILs.  Unfortunately, it appears that many spammers now can afford the disk and processor resources to enable queueing and retrying so its usefulness is diminishing.

The issue that has bugged me with it is that it does not deliver the email that causes the site to be whitelisted.  You have to wait for it to try yet another time to actually get it.

The small business mail server does not have that implemented at this time.  I hope to avoid it, but will have to see what happens in the future.