Getting The Best Out Of MailScanner

• MTA (Sendmail / Postfix / Exim / ZMailer)
  • Blacklists: zen.spamhaus.org, b.barracudacentral.org, bl.spamcop.net
  • Recipient: check no invalid recipients or domains at SMTP time.
    If you are using a MailScanner gateway that has no knowledge of your valid email addresses, there are plenty of ways around this problem, such as milter-ahead or smf-sav.
  • Other features: greet_pause, grey-listing possibly using milter-greylist, rate-limiting using milter-limit
• ClamAV Virus and Spam Scanner
  • Method: Use clamd from within MailScanner, get the RPMs for ClamAV from packages.sw.be
  • Extra Signatures: sane-security, study the list of databases and start with the safe ones. Download regularly using a cron job running one of their download scripts.
• SpamAssassin
  • Rulesets: KAM downloaded daily by using my cron job, sought, JKF-Anti-Phishing Version 2
  • Tools: re2c for the Rule2XSBody SA plugin, Razor, DCC, Pyzor
  • Notes: Read the MailScanner wiki page about SpamAssassin optimisation.
• DNS
  • Running local caching DNS server, forwarding queries to a nearby DNS server which has direct rsync feeds of Zen and SURBL. Note that these data feeds will cost you a bit of money, but are necessary and essential for large sites.
• MailScanner
  • Leave most things set at defaults.
  • Max Children = 4 x number of CPU cores. Each 5 children require 1GB RAM.
  • Do not use MCP, "SpamAssassin Rule Actions" can do everything much faster.

MailScanner would like to thank the following for their support: