Fighting spam and viruses with Sendmail

FILTERING STRATEGIES

Article from Issue 68/2006
Author(s):

A structured approach to Sendmail helps to maximize your spam and virus protection.

The versatile Sendmail Mail Transport Agent (MTA) offers several approaches to managing the virus and spam epidemic. This article introduces three workable anti-spam and anti-virus scenarios before finishing with a discussion of a radical approach that more or less entirely eliminates spam. The discussion assumes you have some basic familiarity with how to configure Sendmail. I will concentrate on practical add-on tools. Certain internal Sendmail configuration settings [1], as well as prevention strategies such as blacklists, also help to fight malware, though these techniques rarely provide a complete solution. For more information on configuring Sendmail, see the summary of sources at the Sendmail website [2].

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Amavisd-new

    Sometimes the best time to stop bad mail is before it arrives. AmavisdNew is an Open Source interface for integrating spam and virus filtering with your mail server.

  • Charly’s Column: SendmailAnalyzer

    During the ongoing battle against spam, admins should inspect their troop’s battle lines from time to time. If you don’t relish the thought of counting the dinnerware, you can use the services of a logfile inspector like SendmailAnalyzer, which works surprisingly well with Postfix and the like.

  • Brave GNU World

    This column looks into projects and current affairs in the world of free software from the perspective of the GNU Project and the FSF. In this issue, we focus on AmavisdNew, a new daemon that operates as a spam filter.

  • Commercial Mail Servers

    They run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, cost money, and juggle email messages: these three commercial mail servers aim to convince admins they are worth the price.

  • 2010 Mails Trigger SpamAssassin

    The Apache Project has warned of a bug in versions 3.2.0 to 3.2.5 of SpamAssassin that triggers an excessive number of spam alerts by mails from 2010. Debian Lenny is also infected.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News