Fighting spam and viruses with Sendmail

FILTERING STRATEGIES

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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].