So I decided to install a full anti-virus and Spam filtering system on my web/mail server using Amavisd-new/ClamAV/SpamAssassin. This has gone pretty well especially since I’m using the Razor plugin for SpamAssassin.

Razor is like a collaborative network of machines which hold signatures for spam that is currently circulating around the Web. Each time I receive a mail into my system, a unique signature is generated for it and this signature is checked against the signature database in Razor servers on the net. This catches so many spam emails it’s not funny. On certain days I Razor catches 77 spam messages and all my normal emails are untouched and end up in my inbox. Razor is a true lifesaver.

ClamAV is also pretty good at catching viruses in email. It just scans each mail as it comes in and if it’s infected, puts it in ‘quarantine’ and sends the admin an email about it. Very transparent and it works nicely.

The only downside to all this was that I had to pull some packages from Debian’s ‘testing’ branch which may not receive timely security updates. I didn’t think that I could rely on ‘testing’ to give me timely updates and this seems to confirm it. The official word seems to confirm this as well. I guess my only choice is to add:

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main

to the sources.list file and hope I get timely updates from both.