[Leica] Palo Alto Control, we have a possible solution and an alternative

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

John, thanks for your note.
A couple of years ago I separated spamd onto its own machine. That works, 
except that during a spam avalanche the mail machine runs out of VM or PIDs 
or something on spamc. Switching from sendmail to postfix is my key goal; I 
know I can do that /in situ/ on the mail machine without upgrading anything 
else, but the current hardware is 10 years old and the OS is 5 years old and 
it just seems to be time.

I've tried 2 commercial spam-control services, and neither one was 
satisfactory. I haven't tried Spamhouse; I tried Trend's MAPS RBL, which was 
useless, and I tried Spamikaze, which worked moderately well but went out of 
business.

I'll go look up Spamhouse and see what it can offer. Thanks for the advice. 
(I assume you mean Spamhaus, BTW).


> Brian,
>
> And soon an even bigger machine will be necessary.  Some steps you might 
> consider if you haven't already.  Forgive me for making suggestions, but I 
> have been through this too and here is a three-step plan.
>
> 1. Use a Spamhouse datafeed with rsync and mercilessly drop anything 
> incoming which is on their list. The data feed is not free, but life is to 
> short to not use it.  Using Spamhouse with a full-blown named is too slow, 
> rbldnsd is lightweight.
>
> 2. Postfix is a quite efficient MTA, maybe the best.
>
> 3. Spamassasin works quite well, but is quite cpu intensive.  It can, 
> maybe should, be run on a separate system requiring amavis to do this.  
> The spamassassin machine is the one whose cpu needs to grow.
>
> Dealing with spam is time-consuming enough so one occasionally thinks of 
> the Homeric solution: "The son of Phyleus got close up to him and drove a 
> spear into the nape of his neck: it went under his tongue all among his 
> teeth, so he bit the cold bronze, and fell dead in the dust."
>
> John