Rick,
In response to:
Mmmm, no I'm not here to teach you how to run a
public internet mail server
(public-to-the-internet).
You should have learned mailserver basics before you
started running a public server.
Horde and Squirrel are not mail servers. They are
WebMail or IMAP clients.
Email server software for Linux might be 'qmail',
'postfix'.
Correct, Horde etc. are my webmail clients. I mentioned these because I assumed you wanted to get in to the SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper configurations.
My mail server is
exim 4.63.
SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper are both good. They will
very rarely let you "lose" mail, depending on your
configuration.
If you installed all these applications to work
side-by-side with your mailserver, I would have
expected more informed answers (But that's not bad!)
My apologies.
Filtering that happens on the server can solve much
of your 200-Junk-Mails-per-day.
You just have a lot to learn. And we're getting off
topic.
If I knew everything, I wouldn't be asking questions 🙂
We weren't wasting time.
You got some good suggestions about Cloudmark
replacements.
(spamfire, spamsieve)
We had a little chat about filtering being done on
the server.
We were starting to drift off the subject.
I was referring to not intending on wasting your personal time as some your responses seem a little rough around the edges.
You simply couldn't answer questions about your mail
server, that you should have known the answer for 🙂
(name of email server software, etc).
No biggie.
... Exim 4.63
Check my profile, and drop me a note off-list, if you
want some different tips or help with your server.
I appreciate the offer.
---
For anyone following this topic I've done the following:
- Decided not to purchase a third party spam filter addon at this time.
- Although I've looked in to server side SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper configurations, I've decided to not use either of these for now as I'm trying to teach Mac Mail's spam filter the ropes. I always hesitate to auto-delete emails in fear I might miss something. Being that I normally use Mac Mail, I'd have to sift through the
**SPAM** mails generated by SpamAssassin anyways. As I'm teaching Mail to identify spam, I don't think counting one then the other would do anything more than confuse the process and make more work for me in the long run. (I could be wrong.)
- Using exclusively Mac Mail's spam filter I've manually sifted through over 7,000 spam messages in hopes to teach the software what I'm looking for it to identify.
- Of these 7,000 spam messages, I 'bounced' them all back using Mail... every one of them. This was done somewhat out of frustration, but if I understand this correctly spammers don't want to waste their time and resources emailing bad emails. By bouncing emails back to the source (if the spam email was valid) I'm hoping to get knocked off spam lists over time. I had a brief concern of server load, but everything was smooth. A drawback is many of the spam emails are not valid, so getting many returned mails is part of the process, and honestly it's worth it. (for me)
- I don't think my spam problem will ever go away entirely. I'll always have to manually scan all emails at least briefly. The hope is to get Mail's spam filter accurate so suspected spam is in a spam box, and my regular mail boxes are clean. When it's time to manually scan the junk mail box, in time it should be pretty quick.
Thank you to everyone's helpful responses, as Rick mentioned indeed I have much to learn!
