[Trilug-ontopic] mailing list server filtering setup questions

[Cristóbal Palmer]

Greetings LUGers. I wanted to send a follow-up to my original email
for archival purposes.

We ended up putting SpamAssassin on the existing mailing list server
and tweaking the configuration so that it would not seriously impact
performance. SA does nothing but tag messages, and there's one global
config. Seems to be working gracefully with the vast majority of our
mailman lists.

We went with this solution because it offered the best bang for the
buck and was a change that could be made live (and most importantly,
rolled back from) with relatively little risk and no downtime.

Cheers,
CMP

On Dec 20, 2007 11:33 AM, Cristóbal Palmer <cristobalpalmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings LUGers. I seek your collective wisdom.
>
> I have a mailing list server with 588 lists on it that handled 860
> incoming posts yesterday. Spamassassin is NOT running on this machine,
> and we do not plan to add it. We need some filtering, though. To that
> end, I'm trying to spec out a spam filtering server to go in front of
> it. Current thinking is to have the filtering box running Fedora and
> performing the following functions:
>
> postfix + greylisting
> spamassassin
> virus scanning (?)
>
> The plan also has us changing this:
>
> lists.example.org.       IN       MX       10 lists.example.org.
>
> to:
>
> lists.example.org.       IN       MX       5 list-filtering.example.org.
> lists.example.org.       IN       MX       10 lists.example.org.
>
> I'm wanting feedback in three major areas:
>
> (1) Is the overarching plan sound? Is there a better way to go about
> this? Is there a major element I've left out?
> (2) What are reasonable hardware specs for the filtering box? I've got
> a 1.4GHz pIII 1U server with 2GB of RAM at my disposal. If that won't
> do, suggestions on how to revamp my plan to be able to use the 1U just
> mentioned are most welcome.
> (3) How do I build a good test system for the filtering box? Any other
> deployment tips? Anybody on the list *done* something like this
> before?
>
> Before you ask: No, we don't have money to buy anything. My labor is
> essentially all I can add to this project. Viable alternatives to
> Fedora include... maybe CentOS, and that's about it. Any system that
> goes in place MUST fail back to the original state of just having the
> working list server with no filtering.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Cristóbal M. Palmer
> celebrating 15 years of sunsite/metalab/ibiblio:
> http://tinyurl.com/2o8hj4
>



-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
http://tinyurl.com/3apraw "They also abandoned other volumes, later,
while fleeing from the librarians."