MailScanner Service on New Server

Posted in Site News

Mail Scanner

The new server will be for premium hosting services, and fully managed sites. I am adding features to it for enhanced security and usability. One of those features is a server side spam filtering service with configuration options within cPanel.

Catch Spam As Soon as Possible

On our Beef server, I recommend people use a service like gMail to retrieve their domain’s email, and take advantage of Google’s built-in spam filtering. That works fine for individuals and most small organizations, but it does show the path the email takes in the header. Other options include commercial services that require changing the MX records on the domain, and they work fine. For instance, Google Apps will have the MX records changed, and the email goes directly to Google’s servers rather than through the domain. But like the free gMail option, the email headers show the path the email has taken.

Our new server is named “Chicken”. As you can see, I’m carrying out the “kabob” theme with our server names (our DNS servers are named “Pepper” and “Onion”). On Chicken I’m taking a different approach, with server-side email scanning from the well-regarded opensource project MailScanner that leaves the email headers intact. I have used a commercial installation service to install and configure MailScanner and add a plugin to cPanel for configuration, and made the mistake of calling it “commercial” software for that reason. The “commercial” portion of the project is simply the installation and configuration service, and the plug-in interface to cPanel. Jules, the developer of MailScanner, caught my error (you can see his comment below). My apologies to Jules!

Numerous configuration options exist, including white listing, black listing, and different levels of spam filtering, all easily accessed from the customer’s cPanel. Testing is on-going with only a few domains on the server, but I like what I’m seeing so far:

MailScanner Status:
57 messages Scanned by MailScanner
943.1 Total KB
10 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
2 Viruses found by MailScanner
6 Content Problems found by MailScanner
55 Messages delivered by MailScanner

I am having Mailscanner deliver all messages, except those containing viruses, to check for “false positives.” So far it seems to be working very well with the default settings.

Post edited Dec. 12, 2011, to correct description of MailScanner.