Anyone checking out any of the sites I host over the last few days will have noticed some significant problems. This is due to spam.

I had been using SpamAssassin to filter out the rubbish before Exim delivered the mail. However I was noticing that quite a lot of spam was getting through and upon investigation it was clear that I needed to keep the rules updated. Whilst doing this I also looked at implementing rejecting the mail even before it’s accepted by Exim and adding antivirus functionality using ClamAV.

All this lead me down the path of configuring Exim with Exiscan and SA-Exim using this excellent document (pdf) as a guide. Unfortunately it turns out that this is very resource intensive which is no good if your server doesn’t have much memory as mine does (96MBytes). It also doesn’t help when the antivirus daemon, clamd, dies for no apparent reason.

The first problem, lack of memory, lead to the server getting busied out with swapping. The second problem caused all e-mail to be temporarily rejected until clamd was restarted.

I’ve now upgraded to a newer version of ClamAV and I’ve ditched SpamAssassin in favour of Bogofilter (what a great name!) running as a filter after the mail has been accepted.

Perhaps one day I’ll get myself a more capable server. I’m keeping my eye on eBay for a Shuttle.