Setting up the system, I learned a lot about mail servers in a short period of time, including how to integrate such things as virus scanners and spam filters. When I first set up my mail server, spam was a growing problem, but in the last several months it has become a huge problem. I have been using Spamassassin, the reigning king of spam filters, but- largely due to my implementation- not always successfully.

I found a tool called Scope, a process engine for XMail that enables you to run out of process filters, etc. written in Perl. Scope allows you to run Spamassassin on Windows without having to invoke the spamassassin.exe executable every time the spam filter is called. I ran Spamassassin for awhile using Scope, but I started to notice that HTML-formatted messages would fail to be processed correctly by Spamassassin. I also noticed that Scope would periodically die and generate a huge number of errors on the server. Soon I was getting inundated with HTML email spams.

I didn't give up, though (mainly because my wife complained that she had to sift through 50 or so spams a day- and that was just the portion not getting caught by the filter). I decided I was going to conquer the problem no matter how much time it took to resolve. Maybe not the most cost-effective strategy, but the most personally satisfying one, for sure. I spent some time on the XMail Forums and found that there are now lots of options in the world of spam control. I tried to get some movement out of the Scope developer, but I never got an answer about debugging the issue with Scope. I'm no C programmer, so debugging it myself was not very appealing. Instead, I found a post on the XMail forum that referred to a Win32 port of Spamassassin, SAWin32. There was even a pretty good HOWTO for installing SAWin32. I got it running and found a Perl filter (which I have since customized) to invoke SAWin32 through the XMail filter plugin system. My spam incidence has dropped from 50 spams per day per box getting through the filter to almost nothing getting through. Well worth the time spent learning about the solution.

Next on my list is either significantly altering the Perl script (and if you know me you know how much I dislike having to do anything in Perl) or re-writing the Perl filter in some other language- either Javascript or C#, most likely. I'd like something cross-platform so I can offer it back to the XMail community, so I may need to give it more thought.