Approach

While I suspect we'll eventually get into anti-spam for any number of reasons, initially, we'll be concerned mainly with members-only mailing lists. Given that, we can solve the spam completely and easily by simply discarding (or better yet, rejecting during the SMTP conversation) all mail from non-list-members. After taking care of the mailman admin approval queues for a few months, I don't see this as being a problem. We get so little legit mail in these queues that I think I'm willing to call the once-every-other-month mis-posted message "acceptable losses". That would kill the gnhlug-jobs list, though. OTOH, that list doesn't appear to get any legit traffic, so maybe it's already dead. A web-based interface would be better anyway, I think. There are a few aliases (chairman@, etc.) that we might have to worry about. -- BenScott - 23 Feb 2006

The gnhlug-jobs list does get some legit traffic. We have had 9 legit messages so far in February, mixed in with over 100 garbage messages. I am not sure the list is worth keeping in current form, though, the high volume of spam is a PITA. -- MikeLedoux - 23 Feb 2006

Software

Given that a lot of the following things are complementary and can be used together, the current layout of the discussion (votes and pros and cons) seems broken to me. -- BenScott - 23 Feb 2006

Votes for:

• MailScanner
  • BillMcGonigle
• AMaVIS
• SpamAssassin
  • ColeTuininga
  • MikeLedoux
• Spamhaus rbl(s)
  • ColeTuininga
  • BruceDawson (Not necessarily Spamhaus)

Experience with (admin level):

• MailScanner
  • BillMcGonigle
• AMaVIS
• SpamAssassin
  • ColeTuininga
  • MikeLedoux
• RBLs
  • ColeTuininga
  • BruceDawson

Reasons for:

• MailScanner
  • Easy to configure, modify configuration, very flexible. Auto-updates for ClamAV, RulesDuJour. Integrates SpamAssassin without separate daemon. Disarms spam, phishing, viruses, "active" HTML mail. -- BillMcGonigle - 20 Feb 2006
• AMaVIS
• SpamAssassin
  • Easily configured, low maintenance, good results, low-to-zero false-positives. -- MikeLedoux - 21 Feb 2006
• RBLs
  • Someone else does the bulk of the work -- BruceDawson - 22 Feb 2006
  • Have a small footprint on the system -- BruceDawson - 22 Feb 2006
  • Catch 90% of the SPAM. -- BruceDawson - 22 Feb 2006

Reasons against:

• MailScanner
  • Somewhat CPU intensive. I've never seen decent hardware CPU bound by it though. -- BillMcGonigle - 20 Feb 2006
• AMaVIS
• RBLs
  • The lists are maintained by others -- BruceDawson - 22 Feb 2006
  • Some discriminate against dynamic and other large block of IPs. -- BruceDawson - 22 Feb 2006