I run my own mail server for which I actually bought the software and it runs on Windows. I am using
Argosoft Pro Mail Server on the same machine that I run my websites on with
Apache HTTP Server. Lately I wanted to run a webmail server as well and though the Argosoft program has this capability built in I didn't like the idea of opening and using a non standard port to serve the pages. First thing I needed was a pop3/smtp capable webmail client. I tried a bunch but some were either bordering on groupware apps, others simply didn't work, and others were woefully slow and featureless. I was on the verge of giving up when by accident almost I stumbled onto the
Telaen 1.1.0 RC1 webmail client software. The program supports pop3,imap, and smtp protocols lets users recieve html email, attachments, and includes a JavaScript html editor
TinyMCE for composing email. If that wasn't enough the program has multiple languages support and is spam aware....
Telaen provides support for auto-SPAM detection and the automatic movement of detected SPAM messages to the user's SPAM folder. It does this via 2 methods:
1. System-wide: The Telaen Administrator sets a regular expression (the default is "***SPAM***" and "***VIRUS***") that is scanned for in each Email message's Subject line.If the regex matches, that message is moved to the SPAM folder automatically.
2. Per-User: Telaen is also aware of the SpamAssassin (and other) X-Spam-Level header, which provides a measurement on how "SPAM-worthy" this message is. A lower number means it does not have a lot of the characteristics
of SPAM; a higher number means it does. The user can set their own personal preference on how sensitive they want to be in Telaen auto-populating the SPAM folder. If they set a high sensitivity (which corresponds to a lower number) than all messages at the level or higher will be automatically moved to the SPAM folder. A setting of '0' disables this.
It should be noted that Telaen itself does not scan or parse the messages themselves to determine if they are SPAM. Instead, it relies on that parsing/filtering already being down at the MTA/MDA layer. Telaen simply uses the results of that previously performed scanning to know what to do with the message.
So next the issue became how to get this "X-Spam-Level header" measurement inserted in the headers of the emails I receive. There are some products out there that will do this for Argosoft but I was really curious about
SpamAssassin since it is after all free and from all the comments I had read about it very effective as well. After doing a web search I found
this page It explains in simple details how to make a customized SpamAsassin package for Argosoft which builds the dll for the server extension to incorperate it with Argosoft. The package also provides a GUI interface for configuring it. The install was flawless I had to change some paths in the configuration screens after I got it built since I have perl installed differently than the instructions specified but after doing that the program started flagging, rejecting, and logging email according to the settings I specified in the configuration screens. The whole thing just worked as advertised, Telaen reads the headers and automatically puts the emails in its spam folder. I set it sort of loose to start off with so any that don't get moved have ***spam*** appended to the subject line as well. SpamAsassin uses rules and/or Bayesian filtering. With the rules one can get it started immediately whereas with Bayesian filtering it is recommended that a minimum of 1000 emails be collected first, 500 good ones (ham) and 500 bad ones (spam) to train the filter. I am in the process of doing that now. It will be interesting to see how this affects the programs accuracy once it is complete. Without it and this is purely speculation (based on random analysis of the logs and flagging of emails) it looks to be about 90%+ on the mark using some rule-sets I downloaded at the site offering the package to build the custom SpamAsassin package. This is an excellent Webmail/Spam control package for anyone who uses the Argosoft Pro Mailserver in my opinion. The cost of a setup like this is $88 (price of the Argosoft license) and a little time on the administrators part. When compared to many other commercial offerings this is very reasonable.
