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Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators
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Real anti-spam help for system administrators
In Slamming Spam, two experienced system administrators and 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 production
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
- Designing anti-spam architectures and policies
- 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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.
2. Procmail.
3. SpamAssassin.
4. Native MTA Anti-Spam Features.
5. SMTPAUTH and STARTTLS.
6. Distributed Checksum Filtering.
7. Introduction to Bayesian Filtering.
8. Bayesian Filtering.
9. Email Client Filtering.
10. Microsoft Exchange.
11. Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes.
12. Sender Verification.
About the Authors
After a 10-year career as a UNIX sys admin, ROBERT HASKINS is
Director of Information Technology at ZipLink, an Internet connectivity provider.
Haaskins resides in Amherst, New Hampshire.
DALE NIELSEN is a sys admin and sendmail specialist. He has more
than 16 years' experience maintaining UNIX-based servers, firewalls, and workstations.
Nielsen is a partner in Avacoda Consulting. Nielsen resides in Amherst, Massachusetts.
ROB KOLSTAD is very well known in the UNIX and networking communities.
Rob is currently Director of SAGE, the System Administrators' Guild. He cofounded
BSDI, a company originally devoted to building commercial releases of BSD. Kolstad
resides in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 1 Average Customer Rating: Aug 5, 2005 Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP
Important book in fight against SPAM
I was naive to believe that stricter laws would decrease spam. Now I think that while stricter laws may not decrease the amount of spam that spammers send, they can certainly help filters to decrease the amount of spam that recipients actually see.
The Bayes theorem used to fight spam by most of the spam filters of the day finds its roots in 1763 when a year after his death the work of Thomas Bayes was published. The development of probability theory in the early 18th century arose to answer questions in gambling, and to underpin the new and related ideas of insurance. A problem arose, known as the question of inverse probability: the mathematicians of the time knew how to find the probability that, say, 4 people aged 50 die in a given year out of a sample of 60 if the probability of any one of them dying was known. But they did not know how to find the probability of one 50-year old dying based on the observation that 4 had died out of 60. Like many educated men of his time, Bayes was both a clergyman and an amateur scientist/mathematician. His solution, known as Bayes' theorem, underlies, and gave its name to, the modern Bayesian approach to the analysis of all kinds of data.
A nice read to understand the ongoing battle against spam.
Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP
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