[TriLUG] Help: Spam Filtering

[Jon Carnes]

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 17:44, William Ward wrote:
> Guys and Gals:
> 
> I spoke to my boss about using SpamAssassin as a potential tool for 
> reducing the spam count, but he says we're going to buy Brightmail 
> services this week.  I have a small window of opportunity (basically 
> tomorrow) to write up a proposal with concrete comparisons between 
> Brightmail and SpamAssassin.  He doesn't understand the implications of 
> going with Open Source/Free Software and the "its free" pricetag isn't 
> working.

Sounds like a done deal...  Does it help to know that Brightmail and
SpamAssassin operate on pretty much the same model.  

 Effective & Accurate
 - Fewer than 1 in 100,000 false positives. You can raise or lower this
by tweaking the threshold values.
 - Established as the most effective anti-spam solution by actual
corporations that use Unix/Linux mail servers.

Dynamic
- Real-time detection and analysis
- Open source application that is continually updated by thousands of
system administrators - 24/365 analysis and rule writing
- Updates can  be automatically be pulled down to your server to
continually  prevent spam from reaching your end-users

Secure
- Email never leaves your messaging environment
- Users' mail is never opened, protecting privacy

Open Source & Scalable
- Updated by hundreds of thousands of users and system administrators
daily - a network of real email boxes with an actual reach of 100
million inboxes
- Scalable to 10M+ users
- SpamAssassin is Open Source and protected by the GPL.

System Architecture and Requirements
SpamAssassin is built with a Client-Server architecture; the client
integrates with the MTA to pass message headers and content to the
SpamAssassin Server (daemon) - which renders a verdict on the message
and instructs the MTA what to do with it.

Supported Mail Systems - Primary: Sendmail, Exim, Postfix
  Secondary: Openwave Email Mx, CP Messaging Server, Sendmail, and
Exchange 2000

Supported Operating Systems: Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, Linux, OpenBSD

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Hope this helps a bit - Jon Carnes