Block spam using virus scanner

This is an awesome idea that we just implemented and that caused another large improvement in the amount of spam that is successfully detected and dropped by the mail servers. Sane Security provides virus, phishing and scam signatures for ClamAV that can detect most known mails with such content. Quite clever and effective.

Using a virus scanner to check for known content signatures is much more efficient than pushing an email through a bunch of algorithms to analyze individual words of an email. Both Bayesian filtering and Spam Assassin are generally quite CPU-intensive so this should give your system a break.

More info here.

3 thoughts on “Block spam using virus scanner

  1. It’s proving to be fairly effective. In the past 8 hours, ClamAV has taken the lead on SA and has droppped almost double the number of messages while reducing overall system load. 🙂

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