About three years ago, when we first installed our mailserver, we decided to give Postgrey a shot. It worked pretty well for about two years. It did pretty much what we needed it to do — block SPAM. Since everyone here uses either a Mac or a Linux setup, we didn’t have a big need for scanning incoming emails for virus. Well, the situation didn’t change much, but the amount of emails going through our system did. We’ve started to see more and more SPAM going through the graylisting as spammers become more sophisticated. However, over the past few months, we’ve received a few complaints from customers about emails that did not go through (only a few, but that is serious enough). Hence we needed to take action.

Since our system is pretty straight forward (Postfix + DBmail), our conclusion was that it was the graylisting that caused us trouble. We took a fresh look on the market and realized that SpamAssassin probably was the best way to go. Thanks to FreeBSD’s ports, we were able to replace Postgray with SpamAssassin in less than an hour.

This morning when I woke up, I took a look at the maillogs. SpamAssassin seems to be doing it’s job pretty well, as it caught a bunch of SPAM. Bye Bye Postgrey. Welcome SpamAssassin.