On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 04:48 -0500, Patrick70 wrote: > I recently made the switch from Windows Vista to Ubuntu and am in the > process of figuring out how everything works and finding the software > which I need. > In Linux anti-spam and anti-virus packages are designed to run in conjunction with a mail server, thats usually Sendmail which is a bear to configure but can be easily replaced. I prefer Postfix. If your ISP has adequate spam and virus traps, just point your mail reader at their mailserver and change the aliases on your internal mail server to redirect system mail from root to your ISP account - this way you'll see it as part of your normal mail stream. OTOH, if you like to experiment, here's a summary the bits that are typically used to assemble a small mailserver-based set-up. The key to understanding it is that each item does just one task and does it well: - I use the Postfix mailserver as the centre of the system. - aliases redirect system mail to my usual login user - getmail retrieves mail from my ISP usual POP3 and passes it to Postfix. - outbound mail goes through Postfix, which forwards it to my ISP's mailserver - Spamassassin is used by Postfix to mark up spam. It doesn't delete anything, just marks mail as spam or not-spam. Most mail readers can sort spam into separate folders or you can use procmail to delete spam automatically. - ClamAV does the same for virus detection. As an all-Linux set-up I don't use any anti-virus software, but if I had Windows on my local network I would use it. - amavis-new can be used to manage Spamassin and Clamav on behalf of Postfix but you don't have to use it. - if you have several computers, the one running your central mailserver must also run Dovecot, which provides POP3 or IMAP services to mail readers on the other computers. They send mail to the central mailserver using SMTP, which collates it and forwards it to the outside world or to your other computers. Once you have such a system running you can pretty much forget it because it all "just works". I haven't changed my Postfix, getmail and Dovecot configurations for over 5 years. The only fiddling I do on anything like a regular basis is to write new Spamassassin rules as new types of spam starts to appear - and I only do that because its my equivalent of solving crosswords. Martin
