Alternatives to Spam Assassin

[Rob]

Does anyone know of any good alternatives to Spam Assassin? I'm not using it as it eats up to much RAM

[thisisit3]

i believe that nothing is as good as SA.

indeed it does eat a lot of memory and if you are on a small VPS then it can be a real problem, especially if you are also running cPanel which eats even more memory.

i'd suggest you set the max-children parameter to 1 instead of the default 3, that should cut memory usage considerably, then if you are using cPanel, completely disable the mailing list software (mailman i think?) that should save up another huge (and useless) chunk of memory.

oh, one last thing, try the "Apache memory limit" script in my signature.

[Rob]

Well ive got enough RAM to run SA its just i don't want it eating up to many resources. How do i set the max-children parameter in spam assassin?

[thisisit3]

If you have SA installed manually, then just edit your /etc/sysconfig/spamassassin or init.d script and add --max-children=1 as a parameter.

If you use cPanel then do the following:

1) Login to WHM
2) go to cPanel -> Addon Modules -> spamdconf, enable/install module
3) re-log to WHM and...
4) go to Add-ons -> Setup Spamd Startup Configuration -> Maximum Children, set to 1.

i'm not sure about other control panels, but if you look carefully you'll find the place were they execute spamd and you'll just add the --max-children parameter by hand.

[Vin DSL]

i believe that nothing is as good as SA...

Gotta agree!

SA rocks at JagPC! Just took a while to figure it out...

[matzah]

I went with ASSP Delux (let me know if you decide to go with it and Ill get you directly to the script writer for the delux release) and it uses less than 1% of CPU and cut the SPAM to close to nothing.... and if stuff gets by, it is a simple email forward away to re-train on any problems.

[ethix]

i find using "drop dnslists" work pretty good for me no noticeable CPU/RAM usage and around 3/4 of SPAM blocked right at the initial stage

[thisisit3]

I always wondered if Jag's Dedicated & VPS servers have RBL's enabled at the MTA level or not.

Looking at my exim configuration, it seems its not using any lists like that.

Can someone from Jag please confirm this?

[JPC-Veena]

No, we don't add rbls at MTA level on vps, we tried it on a couple of shared boxes once, but did not work out well iirc. However I have seen rbls in exim.conf on Directadmin vps, probably added by DA or possible the vps owner

[Rob]

i thought i would try that ASSP Delux which matzah told us about. Just need to get a licence

[thisisit3]

No, we don't add rbls at MTA level on vps, we tried it on a couple of shared boxes once, but did not work out well iirc. However I have seen rbls in exim.conf on Directadmin vps, probably added by DA or possible the vps owner

Is there an example configuration for cPanel/exim that we can try ourselfs?

[ethix]

in WHM (cpanel11) you can do it via "Service Configuration" --> "Exim Configuration Editor " and tick the appropriate boxes

or done manually
after

#!!# ACL that is used after the RCPT command
check_recipient:
  # Exim 3 had no checking on -bs messages, so for compatibility
  # we accept if the source is local SMTP (i.e. not over TCP/IP).
  # We do this by testing for an empty sending host field.
  accept  hosts = :

i added

drop dnslists = sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org : \
list.dsbl.org

message = REJECTED - Host $sender_host_address is listed in $dnslist_domain=$dnslist_value - $dnslist_text
log_message = match $dnslist_domain

[thisisit3]

hmmm i'm using v10 at the moment (STABLE), i'll upgrade to v11 when its out next month or so.

i'll wait till then.

thanks for the info!