Course contents

Position reckoning

• What's going on out there at port 25?
• What are the anti-spam community's plans and responses to present challenges?>

Viruses, spam & co revisited

• How do I identify viruses, spam & co?
• What are positive and negative hints at the spam nature of an email?
• What we have to put up with: Strengths and weaknesses of the SMTP protocol
• Problems and trends in anti-virus software

Filtering methods

• Connection filter
• SMTP session filter
• Content filter

Efficient email policy design

• Typical errors in policy design
• What does constitute a good mail policy?
• Where and when filters are most efficient
• Where can an email policy server take effect on email traffic?
• How do you position policies correctly?

Correct sizing

• "Brute force does not help!"
• "Measure don't speculate!" - Assigning requirements appropriately
• "Full throttle is wrong!" - Tools for realitistic benchmarking
• Testing your own training server in practice
• Finding and removing bottlenecks

Connection filter

• "Genuine submissions only, please!" - Preserving server resources by connection screening
• Securing service availability and stability with Anvil
• Sustaining services by means of stress-adaptive performance
• Benchmarking

SMTP session filter

• Applying Restrictions without false positives
• Enhancing session filters with policy servers
• Benchmarking
• Optimizing

Content filter

• amavisd-new - programmable framework for content filtering
• Architecture and organisation
• Features
• Content classes
• Developing content policies

Amavisd-new in practice

• Integration - best practices
• "Where is fore and where is aft on this thing?" - Amavis transport directions 101
• Virus-, spam-, attachment- and other content policies
• Exceptions
• Notifications
• Quarantine, methods and administration of quarantining
• On-board Anti-spam methods
• Customizing with Perl, SQL and LDAP
• Benchmarking
• Optimizing

Content filter "SpamAssassin"

• What is SpamAssassin?
• How does SpamAssassin work?
• Base configuration
• Family, friends and foreigners - Trusted instances in SpamAssassin
• What does SpamAssassin examine?
• White- and blacklisting
• Creating own rulesets
• User-specific settings
• Benchmarking
• Optimization

Deliverability

• Sending mail in a world of spam hysteria
• Measuring and monitoring the quality of outgoing mail with open source tools and conforming to the law
• Reputation vs. "dumb" Anti-spam methods
• Identifying, bypassing and rectifying blocks proactively

Availability

• Active security through load balancing
• No mail lost thanks to DRBD

• "Yikes spikes!" - Statistics for postmasters
• Optimizing filters gezielt specifically
• Rapid alert systems against sending failures
• Reporting
• SNMP for postfix und amavisd-new

Course schedule

• Early arrival is possible on the eve of the first seminar day until 10 p.m. The fireplace room and the garden already invite to to a cosy round of shop talk.
• The daily schedule runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (including two coffeebreaks and lunch break), consisting of approximately 60% of instructions and 40% of exercises. Needless to say that every participant works with his "own" dedicated notebook computer, often in step with the tutor.
• After that, it's time for dinner and various offerings like shop talks, excursions et cetera. We aim at creating an ambience for a relaxed exchange among experts. If you'd like more to have a bit of privacy, nothing's compulsory here.