Opensourceinfo

amavisd-new is a high-performance interface between mailer (MTA) and content checkers: virus scanners, and/or SpamAssassin. It is written in Perl for maintainability, without paying a significant price for speed. It talks to MTA via (E)SMTP or LMTP, or by using helper programs. Best with Postfix, fine with dual-sendmail setup and Exim v4, works with sendmail/milter, or with any MTA as a SMTP relay. For Courier and qmail MTA there is a patch in the distributed package.

Bogofilter is a Bayesian spam filter. In its normal mode of operation, it takes an email message or other text on standard input, does a statistical check against lists of "good" and "bad" words, and returns a status code indicating whether or not the message is spam. Bogofilter is designed with fast algorithms (including Berkeley DB system), coded directly in C, and tuned for speed, so it can be used for production by sites that process a lot of mail.

ClamSMTP is an SMTP filter that allows you to check for viruses using the ClamAV anti-virus software. It accepts SMTP connections and forwards the SMTP commands and responses to another SMTP server. The 'DATA' email body is intercepted and scanned before forwarding. ClamSMTP aims to be lightweight, reliable, and simple rather than have a myriad of options. It's written in C without major dependencies.

DSPAM (as in De-Spam) is an extremely scalable, open-source statistical anti-spam filter. While most commercial solutions only provide a mere 95% accuracy (1 error in 20), a majority of DSPAM users frequently see around 99.95% (1 error in 2000) and can sometimes reach peaks as high as 99.991% (2 errors in 22,786). DSPAM presently functions as both a server-side agent for UNIX email servers and a developer's library for mail clients, other anti-spam tools, and similar projects requiring drop-in spam filtering. DSPAM has been implemented on many large and small scale systems with the largest systems being reported at about 125,000 mailboxes.

IMAPFilter is a mail filtering utility. It connects to remote mail servers using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), sends searching queries to the server and processes mailboxes based on the results. It can be used to delete, copy, move, flag, etc. messages residing in mailboxes at the same or different mail servers. The 4rev1 and 4 versions of the IMAP protocol are supported.

MailScanner is an email virus scanner, vulnerability protector, and spam tagger. It supports the Postfix, Sendmail, Exim, Qmail, and ZMailer MTAs, and the Sophos, McAfee, F-Prot, F-Secure, CommandAV, InoculateIT, Inoculan, eTrust, Kaspersky, Nod32, AntiVir, BitDefender, RAV, Panda, DrWeb, ClamAV, and other anti-virus scanners. It uses SpamAssassin for highly successful spam identification, and is designed to handle denial of service attacks. It will detect password-protected zip files and apply filename checking to their contents. It is very easy to install, requires no changes at all to your sendmail.cf file, is designed to be lightweight, and won't grind your mail system to a halt with its load. It can be integrated into any email system, regardless of the software in use.

Postgrey is a Postfix policy server that implements greylisting. When a request for mail delivery is received by Postfix via SMTP, the triplet CLIENT_IP / SENDER / RECIPIENT is built. If it is the first time that this triplet is seen, or if the triplet was first seen less than 10 minutes ago, then the mail gets rejected with a temporary error. Hopefully, spammers or viruses will not try again later, even though such behavior is required per RFC.

Qmail-Scanner is an add-on that enables a Qmail email server to scan gatewayed email for certain characteristics (i.e. a content scanner). It is typically used for its anti-virus and anti-spam protection functions, in which case it is used in conjunction with external scanners. It also enables a site (at a server/site level) to create "Policy blocks": i.e. react to email that contains specific strings in particular headers, or particular attachment filenames or types (e.g. *.VBS attachments).

Quick Spam Filter (QSF) is an Open Source email classification filter, designed to be small, fast, and accurate, which works to classify incoming email as either spam or non-spam. To recognise spam, QSF strips the text out of the email (using MIME decoding and HTML stripping) and then splits it into tokens (words, word pairs, URLs, and so on). These tokens are then looked up in a database and analysed using the Bayesian technique to see whether the email should be classified as spam or not.

SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter that is used to identify spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering. It provides a command line tool to perform filtering, a client-server system to filter large volumes of mail, and Mail::SpamAssassin, a set of Perl modules allowing SpamAssassin to be used in a wide variety of email systems.

SpamProbe operates on a different basis entirely. Instead of using pattern matching and a set of human generated rules SpamProbe relies on a Bayesian analysis of the frequency of words used in spam and non-spam emails received by an individual person. The process is completely automatic and tailors itself to the kinds of emails that each person receives. Works with procmail, maildrop, or a similar tool to produce a complete server or client side spam filtering system.