ASSP’s primary target audience is mail administrators or system administrators at smallish institutions. If you operate an ISP or a mailhost with a heterogeneous user base you may not have a good enough consensus about what spam is or is not. It should work well with between 1 and 300 client addresses and a mail volume of up to around 100,000 messages per day.
Looking for a way to protect your MS Exchange, Postfix, Sendmail, or virtually any other type of SMTP mail server? There’s a few ways to go about it:
- A commercial hardware based solution (e.g. Barracuda Networks) – $$$$$ – Super easy to implement. Just plug it in…
- A commercial software based solution (e.g. GFI Mail Essentials) – $$$ – Installs on an existing server and typically requires little in the way of administration.
- Put together a custom solution using open source software like Postfix, SpamAssassin, Postgrey, Amavis, etc. – Free but requires a fair amount of ongoing administration to keep all the pieces up to date. Requires a fair amount of expertise to configure and maintain.
- An open source solution like Anti-SPAM SMTP Proxy (ASSP) which is an integrated and mostly pre-configured solution – Free, relatively easy to configure and maintain, and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, and other platforms.
ASSP in a Nut Shell
ASSP sits between the internet and your existing mail server. Inbound email is processed by ASSP, filtered, and then passed on to your mail server. Installation involves installing Perl, installing a few Perl modules, installing ASSP, and then configuring ASSP through its own web interface. The entire process is very well documented on the ASSP wiki.
I have yet to install ASSP, but it looks very promising. I look after at least 5 email servers, all of which run combinations of Postfix, Spamassassin, Postgrey, ClamAV, Razor, DCC, and Amavis. They work very well, but its a lot of work keeping them up to date and fully functional. I have high hopes that ASSP will make my life my easier! I’ll report back as soon as its up and running.
Some interesting links:
