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Comment by hiphopyo | Hacker News Reader

Also check this by the author of "The Book of PF": http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/en/spamd.setup.html

- isn't SpamAssassin too big, too old and too ugly considering it, according to the author, only stands for 5% of the anti-spam?

- can ClamAV really catch modern malware or are we just talking legacy viruses from the 90s and 2000s?

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I use SA on my own domains and I feel it is as efficient as Google's own spam detection. Although no spam mails slipped through in months, a few legit got caught due to their incompetence in html-emails.

As for ClamAV, their database is updated frequently. It's probably not as good as commercial vendors such as Symantec, NOD32 and so on (can't compare because I haven't used them for years), but I feel it offers some protection.

At this point I consider myself a competent SA admin. I've got one particular box with a domain going back to at least 1998 that I can't block enough spam, too much still gets through. SpamAssassin is great, but I've been using GMail since the beta and spam almost never gets through, like single digits for me in all that time.

What would you suggest as alternatives for viruses and spam detection?

While I've got a soft spot for SpamAssassin, bogofilter's good and at least by my recollection far less resource-intensive.

available in the ports as mail/bogofilter

Might be a bit more work than SpamAssassin for MTA use as it seems to concentrate on single user use.

For small but multi-user sites, a standard system for incorporating per-user or all-user filtering preferences would be useful....

I'm not aware of such a setup. The article here is useful in that it does at least suggest one mailstream flow. Though yes, it's complex as hell.

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