Slamming Spam: A Guide For System Administrators

Real Anti-Spam Help for System Administrators

In Slamming Spam, two spam fighters show you how to fight back—and win. Unlike most spam books, this one is written specifically for in-the-trenches system administrators: professionals who need hands-on solutions for detecting, managing, and deterring spam in Unix/Linux and/or Microsoft Windows environments.

The authors offer deep, administrator-focused coverage of the most valuable open-source tools for reducing spam's impact in the enterprise—especially SpamAssassin. Drawing on their extensive experience in developing and implementing anti-spam tools, the authors present expert insights into every leading approach to fighting spam, including Bayesian filtering, distributed checksum filtering, and email client filtering.

Coverage includes

• Step-by-step junk mail filtering with Procmail

• Protecting Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Lotus Domino servers from spam

• Making the most of native MTA anti-spam features, including whitelists/blacklists, DNS black hole services, and header checking

• Distributed checksum filtering solutions, including Vipul's Razor and Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse

• McAfee SpamKiller for Lotus Domino

• McAfee SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange

• Implementing and managing SpamAssassin

• Implementing SMTP AUTH, providing effective outbound SMTP authentication and relaying with any mail client; and STARTTLS, encrypting outbound mail content, user names, and passwords

• Sender verification techniques, including challenge/response, special use addresses, and sender compute

• Anti-spam solutions for Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Messenger, and Unix mail clients

Whatever your IT environment and mail platform, Slamming Spam's defense in-depth strategies can help you dramatically reduce spam and all its attendant costs—IT staff time, network/computing resources, and user productivity.