Slamming Spam: A Guide 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.

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.

Robert Haskins works for Renesys Corporation, a leader in real-time Internet connectivity monitoring and reporting. Robert has fought spam in many environments, including enterprises, cable modem ISP, network equipment manufacturer, wholesale dialup ISP, competitive local exchange carrier, and traditional ISP. He has presented on the topic of fighting spam at NANOG, FBI Boston Infragard, and LISA. Robert writes the "ISPadmin" column for USENIX's ;login:. He is a member of USENIX, SAGE, and IEEE.

Dale Nielsen is a partner in Avacoda, LLC, a consulting company specializing in systems administration and software development. He has more than twenty years of experience administering Unix- and Linux-based mail servers, firewalls, and workstations. He has worked in a variety of engineering and software development environments and has taught courses in systems administration at Sun Microsystems. Recently, he's done consulting work for clients such as Nortel Networks and Ziplink. He has written about Linux-based firewalls for the Linux Journal.

Robert and Dale developed a patent-pending anti-spam software solution for Ziplink, Inc.

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