Separate Scan/Anti-Spam Server

[burhankhalid]

Is it possible to have a separate server (physical machine) do all the "washing" of emails and then pass them onto Scalix for delivery only?

I got the idea while stumbling upon this site, which describes the setup of a scanning server:

This document describes how to install Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, and DCC on one box running Fedora Core 4. The installation assumes that Postfix will not be the final destination of incoming mail. Also, no e-mail is sent through it to the outside world. It is a simple MTA that receives e-mail, scans it, and moves it to another MTA for processing.

Does this seems like something that is compatible with Scalix? If so, how would one set it up?

[Kris]

That's possible and it's quite easy to do..
Just setup this anti-spam machine and let this machine receive all e-mail. Then configure this machine to send mail to the scalix server.

The link you posted will give you a good start with the build of such a system.

[burhankhalid]

So how would Scalix recieve emails from this machine? Fetchmail or some other, more elegant way?

[Kris]

Just through smtp. I've a similar system running using Gentoo/Postfix/Amavis. In Postfix, I have a configuration-option saying:

domain.com smtp:192.168.16.8

And this option will send all e-mail for the "domain.com" domain, to 192.168.16.8 which is the Scalix server. I've also configured this machine to lookup valid e-mail addresses in the Scalix ldap database, this way the server is able to reject e-mail for non-valid addresses, which will keep a lot of spam out.

[jhamill]

Is it possible to have a separate server (physical machine) do all the "washing" of emails and then pass them onto Scalix for delivery only?

I got the idea while stumbling upon this site, which describes the setup of a scanning server:

This document describes how to install Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, and DCC on one box running Fedora Core 4. The installation assumes that Postfix will not be the final destination of incoming mail. Also, no e-mail is sent through it to the outside world. It is a simple MTA that receives e-mail, scans it, and moves it to another MTA for processing.

Does this seems like something that is compatible with Scalix? If so, how would one set it up?

we've been doing this for years.when we were using exchange 5.5, it's anti-spam capabilities were limited (none) so we front ended with a few different things over the years. It also allows us to keep the corporate mail store (now scalix) on an entirely private network behind our firewall so it's not exposed to the internet. Currently we are using a VMware appliance called esva as our mail washing application which works very well. there are a few on vmware's website.

I'm looking forward to the scalix vmware appliance at some stage as well :-)

[burhankhalid]

Thanks for the vmware tip, sounds like the best way to test this out.

A few questions:

1. Do you use the scanner for both outgoing and incoming mails? If so, how do you set that up?

2. In Scalix, do I still have to enable the SMTPFILTER setting if the scanning server is an external machine?