I saw someone mention the ASSP anti-spam software at http://assp.sourceforge.net a day or two ago and decided to try it out.
After fiddling around with it for a few hours on a secondary mail server, I can assure you that running this on your iMail box is probably not a great idea if you really want to stop spam. The problem? ASSP (unlike iMail 8.0+) doesn't allow you to run checks on DNS based blacklists (or DNSRBLs) at all. If you run ASSP as a proxy server on the same machine as iMail, it will make iMail's own DNSRBL look-up feature useless, since it would only be doing lookups on the IP address of your own mail server, not the address of the originating sender. All your iMail box will do is a lookup of the IP address 127.0.0.1. If you run ASSP on another server, you will run into the same problem. As soon as you put another server in front of iMail, all DNSRBL look-ups become impossible. Personally, I depend on DNSRBLs like SpamCop a LOT. They easily block 50% or more of the spam hitting my server in the first place, and is a valuable first line of defense. Blocking spam by IP address, before it traverses through memory and CPU hogging filters and rules, is always the best way to go. ASSP does have some great features. I especially like the fact that it allows you to treat certain (seeded) addresses as "honeypot addresses" to collect info on spammers. I couldn't really tell what it did with this data from the documentation though. If it didn't block iMail's DNSRBL capabilities, I'd say that it would be a great add-on product for iMail. As it is now though, it only serves to cripple one of iMail's most powerful anti-spam features. That alone makes the capabilities of ASSP's other features a moot point. That's just my 2 cents though. William Van Hefner Network Administrator Vantek Communications, Inc. 555 H St., Ste. C P.O. Box 155 Eureka, CA 95502-0155 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 707.476.0833 ph --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus] To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
