[TriLUG] mailing list server filtering setup questions

[Cristóbal Palmer]

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