Antispam update

Had continued problems with Maia mailguard configuration. The lack of install documentation for the 1.0.4 fork and my lack of knowledge of php made for a bad combination. Also, as I got further in to it it wasn’t clear how to set it up to handle accounts without mailboxes, as well as I realized it had no concept of white and blacklists for subject or body content. With no real mailboxes training of spam assassin remained another question. If I could have gotten it running maybe I would have figured out the answers to those questions and it would have worked out well. But I also note that the mail list for Maia users is mostly silent save for one recent post asking about upgrading to PHP 7, to which nobody responded. I will say that out of the open source things I looked at Maia still seems like the best one for a small server.

Looking now to the paid options, there’s only 2 that are priced for a “hobbyist” server that’s supporting email for some clubs/groups with no formal organization. However I went back to the awesome folks at Process Software (makers of the Precise Mail Anti-Spam System – PMAS, which was available on my old server) and they worked out something for me.

For me, PMAS is simply the best anti-spam software that I have ever come across. At the admin level it lets me see every address in the system regardless of what type they (mailbox, forwarding, mailman, etc) so you can see all quarantined messages in one place.  It sits at port 25 so if anything is rejected the sender gets confirmation that their email did not go through without creating backscatter. It allows words and phrases to be white or black listed. Daily+ spam rule updates avoid the need to futz with training, a problem for a system like this with no mailboxes that systems that use Baysian engines can’t handle.