Election for the Board of Directors

The Michigan User Group is managed by a group of people we call the Board of Directors. Each year, MUG Members have the opportunity to cast their votes for the 6 people we'd like to see on the board. This is your chance to either run for a position on the board, or vote for the people you would most like to see on the board.

At this time, the following people have been nominated:

    Brown, Duane       Accepted
    Castro, Jorge      declined
    Glutting, Jim      Accepted
    Harding, Rick      Accepted   New
    McQuillan, Jim     Accepted
    Nichols, Gibson    Accepted   New
    Satwicz, Dave      Accepted
    Williams, Dick     Accepted

The nomination period is still open and will remain open until just before the election on Tuesday evening, Feb 13, 2007. If you would like to nominate someone, including yourself, please send an email to board@mug.org stating who you'd like to nominate.

Main Topic: Mail Server setup and configuration, with SPAM filtering

Spam has become a huge problem, clogging up our inboxes and the internet as a whole. there are estimates that 80-90 percent of all email is unwanted, unsolicited junk mail (spam). there's a number of ways to combat this problem. Our first speaker, Bill Allie has recently rebuilt his Linux based mail server and is going to tell us about setting up a basic mail server with SPAM and virus filtering using postfix (why postfix and not sendmail, he'll tell us), greylisting and sagator: http://www.salstar.sk/sagator/.

His goal was to stem the flow of junk mail (both SPAM and viruses) that his server had to handle. He'll discuss what he did to filter out the junk using open source tools. The discussion will cover the selection and configuring of the Mail Transport Agent (MTA), how to limit spam using SMTP policies, header restrictions, spam filtering software, and virus blocking software.

Rick Harding will add his input on using amavisd as the filtering end of the solution as well as some information on tweaking spamassassin.

If you have topics for future meetings you would like us to cover please email the board, thanks.

Rick's Spam Notes

Urls

• http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_spam_postfix/
• http://wiki.splitbrain.org/postfix?DokuWiki=f1cc8a65abe6d4815c2c6d890cd08595
• http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/mail/postfixadmin+on+debian+sarge
• http://postfix.pentachron.net/#AEN172
• Greylisting/Postfix help - http://calum.org/posts/postfix-antispam

Spamassassin Config

• Whilelisting - http://www.mail-archive.com/amavis-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06614.html
• FuzzyOcr - http://www200.pair.com/mecham/spam/image_spam.html
• FuzzyOcr - http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FuzzyOcrPlugin
• Extra Rules - http://www.rulesemporium.com
• ImageInfo plugin - http://www.rulesemporium.com/plugins.htm#imageinfo

Stats

• mailgraph/pflogsumm - http://www.howtoforge.com/mail_statistics_mailgraph_pflogsumm_p2

Packages Used

• Stats - amavis-stats
• Stats - mailgraph
• Postfix
• Postgrey
• amavisd-new
• clamav
• spamassassin
• script really not package - rules_du_jour

Where:

The MUG meetings are held at:

Farmington Community Library - Main Branch
32737 W. 12 Mile Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48334-3302

Click here for a map of the area.

When:

the meetings are on the 2nd Tuesday of each month.

6:00pm	Doors open, registration
6:30pm	Meeting starts, Mug business
6:45pm	Main presentation
8:15pm	2nd Presentation
8:45pm	Meeting adjourns
9:00pm	Dinner at a local establishment