spam filtering solution

[jroysdon]

Right now I accept all mail for the 50 or so domains I host email for. We're using sendmail and I just have a wildcard at the end of each list of valid aliases pointing to a devnull account in virtualusertable ([at]domain.com devnull). I do this as I don't want spammers to be able to talk to sendmail and see if there is/isn't a valid user account.

Unfortunately, this is CPU intensive as spamassassin starts up for each spam email to non-valid accounts that I accept email for. I now limit spamassassin to 5 sessions to try and keep it from hogging the whole system. However, this then bottlenecks valid mail. I even have the spamassassin for my devnull account set to 'whitelist_to *' to try and avoid it wasting time with SA, but it still checks first and scores it, and then whitelists it.

Is there a better method to not letting spammers know what accounts are valid on my system, but still run SA for valid users? Optionally, I do like keeping the mail to my devnull account for spam stats and for troubleshooting human errors on the mail server side of things.

If this isn't the right place to ask such a question, can someone direct me to a better spot? I just figured since there were expert spam-fighters here, there might be some good suggestions.

Thanks,

Jason Roysdon

jason.roysdon.net

[Wazoo]

I'm almost 100% positive that spamassassin has its own support forums ..??? The "new" home is found at http://spamassassin.apache.org/ which contains documentation, FAQ, and other material. If you really want to talk to other SpamCop users about your issues with Spamassassin, I'd think you'd have better luck getting technical over in news://news.spamcop.net/spamcop.geeks ....

[jroysdon]

Thanks, heading there now ;-)'