Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Michele Neylon of Blacknight runs spam filtering for a large number of commercial mail users - but what Open Source technologies are available for dealing with the spam problem. But firstly, why open source? It's flexible, robust, customizable and expandable. Starting from being a small start-up, open source was the only feasible solution at the price-point. Today, open source is still the best technical solution to the problem.
Mailscanner is a perl based MTA agnostic mail scanning tool. It's mature and works on all the required distros (CentOS, Debian, Whitebox, Red Hat, etc.) SpamAssassin provides the main spam filtering functionality.
Over the last few months, the shared mail platform has dropped over 200k mails per hour, 13 million e-mails were processed in the last 5 months of which almost 60% were spam and dropped. This saves a huge amount of storage, network bandwidth and people's time.
Blacknight mirror URIBL and try and share scoring, which means that lookups are on the local network, another mirror is provided for other people as a community service and with sharing, spam patterns are detected quicker and dropped faster. DNS lookups are used to look up a geoip like location for e-mails, and some trust is attributed to various countries.
posted at: 17:41 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
