Re: [cobalt-users] SpamAssassin offloaded to another machine?

["Ian Gibbons" <cobalt-users1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 27 Jan 2004 at 8:53, Greg Hewitt-Long wrote:

> Has anyone off-loaded spamassassin to a secondary machine?
> 
> I have a server I'm trialling NuOnce's implementation of SpamAssassin 
> (http://www.spamassassin.org) and I like the results - however, the server 
> load is amazing (not so much the base product, but I have added 40,000 
> lines of custom rules in the local.cf).  Each spamd grabs up to 78Mb of RAM 
> - so I'm thinking of off-loading the tasks undertaken by SpamAssassin to a 
> secondary machine whose ONLY task it to run spamassassin and razor - has 
> anyone done this?
> 
> I'm thinking that I'll probably use or build a custom machine for this 
> task, something cheap and cheerful, perhaps a colomachines.com box, perhaps 
> a machine using AMD processors I have around - possibly building several 
> machines using even lower specs and attempting to round-robin them if 
> that's possible.
> 
> I'd be interested in the changes to the spamassassin config files here on 
> the RAQs, and experiences of a choice of OS for the separate box - ie, 
> linux/BSD etc.

Hi,

We've done a similar thing here,  our primary server ( first in the MX list) runs 
MailScanner ( plus SpamAssassin, Bayes filtering, razor ) etc.

Our secondary mail servers forward our mail ( not customers mail) through the 
primary.  

It seems to work well, plus with added Bayes filtering in the later versions of 
SpamAssassin, there is only one spam database to be updated.


Another thing that works well is removing all wildcard addressess.  We now return 
a 550 Mailbox Not found message with a link to our websites contact form.


Next thing on the list is to intergrate SpamAssassin into Sendmails Milter, then we 
can reject spam during the transaction stage.

Regards

Ian
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