Ideas on Fairly simple Spam reject at SMTP gateway?

[Rick Stevens]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Mi, den 27.04.2005 schrieb Neal Rhodes um 22:25:
> 
> Please don't reply to a previous list mail when starting a new topic.
> Now your new mail is a reply to "Re: All coreutils binaries segfault,
> requiring complete reinstall of linux".
> 
> 
>>Assuming one doesn't have the time to make a major career out of it, are
>>there recommendations for putting up an SMTP gateway that does the basic
>>spam detection and rejection?    I heard "procmail" was generally favored
>>by some, but after installing, it doesn't seem to have anything configured. 
>>
>>I guess I'm hoping for a recipe, or at least an ingredients list. 
> 
> 
>>Neal Rhodes                    MNOP Ltd                       (770) 972-5430
> 
> 
> Procmail is no spam detection tool. SpamAssassin (shipped with Core) is
> one which is for spam rating of mail. It can be integrated to the mail
> server system by using Procmail. Procmail can not reject mail but only
> can lead to bounces which is bad as you would hit to many faked and
> innocent senders.

More correctly, procmail is an MDA or "mail delivery agent".  It is
responsible for the final delivery of mail into a mailbox or somewhere
else via a forward or intermediary program.

For the archives:

MTA - Mail Transport Agent.  Responsible for sending mail between 
systems using the SMTP ("simple mail transport protocol") protocol or
a derivative such as SMTP-S.  Programs such as sendmail, postfix, 
Exchange and qmail are MTAs (Exchange is an oddball--it acts as MTA,
MDA and MUA).

MDA - Mail Delivery Agent.  Responsible for delivering mail to mailboxes
for pickup by MUAs (see below) or for forwarding or bouncing mail using
an intermediate agency (such as invoking sendmail to send mail off-
system).  Programs such as procmail are MDAs.

MUA - Mail User Agent.  Responsible for delivering mail to a user.
The most common MUA protocols are imap4 and pop3.  Programs such as
imapd, pop3d and dovecot are MUAs.

MCP - Mail Client Program.  Responsible for displaying mail to the user
after picking it up from a MUA.  Programs such as Thunderbird, Outlook,
Eudora, Mozilla Mail, Evolution, *nix mail, pine, and elm are MCPs.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-           "I understand Windows 2000 has a Y2K problem."           -
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