Free Software
June 6, 2006 – 6:05 pmFor the past three weeks I’ve been in the process of building a new email filtering gateway/relay, diligently hacking away at an installation of Suse Linux on an old Postfix as the mail transfer agent, to accept and eventually relay the email to it’s rightful destination. Postfix calls upon Postgrey for greylisting and a hacked version of AMaViS as the content filter. AMaViS is in charge of conjuring up SpamAssassin (the bayesian email analysis software) and ClamAV (the antivirus, anti-phishing software). All information is stored in and called from a MySQL database. It’s also running the Apache HTTP Server and PHP so that we can offer the web based user interface called Maia Mailguard to allow our clients to administer their own individual email filtering preferences.
Some other notable software/scripts/utilities being used on this machine include:
- Blowfish encryption to lock down all of the stored email in the MySQL database.
- Vipul’s Razor, DCC and the SpamCop RBL to shutout known spammers.
- Mailgraph and Queuegraph to help me monitor the whole thing.
- RRDTool, which is needed for Mailgraph and Queuegraph.
- The Smarty Template Engine for most of the user interface web pages.
By now you probably think I’m trying to brag about my amazing accomplishment. Well, I’m not actually. I just want to point out the fact that it takes a lot of different elements to make a server come together and do what it does, 24/7/365, and the fact that you can do it for free due to the generosity of the online community. All of the software I mentioned here is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.
I never cease to be amazed at the culture that the internet has created. There are thousands of people who spend most, if not all of their free time putting together some script or piece of software that they need for some particular personal use. And when they’re done, they give it away to anyone else that might need it, in most cases asking only for the recognition of being the one who made it.
Let’s not forget the many more thousands of people who patrol the online forums and mailing lists, eager to help out a fellow geek who can’t figure out why his script is returning fatal errors. Not to mention the folks who shell out their own hard earned cash to make sure all of those forums and mailing lists have a place to live and be accessed by anyone who wishes.
I’m making this entry my public ‘thank you’ to all of the people who wrote all of the stuff I used on my server, including the numerous other utilities that are being used on that machine which I simply don’t have the space to mention here.
