October 11, 2004

Spam/Virus Appliance

Kinda quiet in here recently. I’ve been devoting most of my spare time to building an anti-spam/anti-virus gateway appliance.

Building on the LDAP routing work in Sendmail, I’ve been putting together the appropriate pieces to make a mostly stand-alone gateway appliance for filtering, quarantining, dropping, etc. spam and viruses. The main pieces are

  • SpamAssassin for spam detection.
  • MIMEDefang for the milter glue to put together spam and virus detection.
  • WebUserPrefs for the user interface to the SpamAssassin settings, as well as my own code to make it work with quarantined messages.

The MIMEDefang filter is where most of the glue resides — identifying local recipients, getting their SA prefs from a MySQL database, doing the right actions for identified spam (tagging, or quarantining), etc. WebUserPrefs needed some tweaks to make it SA 3.0 compliant, and I needed to write an auth mechanism for the user database. Also an interface to the quarantine queue — message details are stored in the database, and then a program can be called to pass the message along or to delete it entirely.

At this point I’ve got it all pretty much working. I need to tie a few ends together and redeploy it to a clean test system, then have people start testing it.

Posted by Rowan Littell at October 11, 2004 01:28 PM