Rspamd

Revision as of 05:36, 17 October 2017 by Phoenix (talk | contribs)

Rspamd

Fast, free and open-source spam filtering system

Introduction

I've been looking for a suitable replacement for DSPAM, a project that was good but died and became unmaintained then totally removed from Zimbra. In recent searches I came across Rspamd which does all that DSPAM did and more and it can completely replace spamassassin - it's lighter, more configurable and more performant than spamassassin. These notes are a brief explanation of how to easily integrate rspamd into a ZCS server and disable spamassassin completely.

You should make these changes on a test server and backup any ZCS & rspamd configuration files that you are going to modify before you modify them - when you're happy that it works you can try it on a live server but again, make sure you backup any modified configuration files.

These are notes for installing rspamd on ZCS 8.7.x (my current version is 8.7.11), I use CentOS and these instructions are for that distribution and the equivalent version of RHEL although installing rspamd on Ubuntu should not be that different.

NB: Rmilter from the Rspamd project and documented on their web site is deprecated and won't be available as a separate package in future, do not use it.

[EDIT] As of today (2017-09-06) I have updated my server to the latest ZCS 8.8.3GA release and these instructions work and are valid for that version as well.

I've been running various versions of Rspamd for the last eight months and have not had any ill effects, although I only run this on my home server there has been a huge reduction in CPU usage from 15-20% to less than 5% for the same levels of inbound/outbound email. I have also removed all DNS & Protocol checks from within the ZCS configuration and the Postscreen settings have been set to their default values – this leads to rspamd processing all inbound email and also further CPU usage reductions.

The current rspamd install now uses an inbuilt milter compatible process for the mail that's sent to it, the anti-spam etc. components of rspamd for processing the mail through it's various modules and pass it back to postfix via the milter process. Do note that this configuration still uses the ZCS inbuilt amavisd & clamav for anti-virus processing.

The multiple-milter function in Postfix is broken by ZCS and only allows one milter to be functional (bugzilla report 97706 ), although that bug seems to require a trivial fix it’s unfortunately still languishing without any attention for the past two-plus years - please add your comments and vote if you feel it should be implemented.

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