Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators [Paperback]

Robert Haskins (Author), Dale Nielsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0131467166 | ISBN-13: 978-0131467163

Spam makes up more than half of all e-mail sent worldwide, and more than 70percent in the United States. The cost of spam is escalating for enterprises asthe amount of unsolicited e-mail being sent continues to reach new heights.Analysts estimate businesses lose up to $10 billion each year in lost productivityand services.Slamming Spam is an administrator's "how to" stop spam book. It is very handson,with none of the "why people spam" or other topics that are found in otherbooks and usually only peripherally interesting or useful to a mail administrator.Most books out there now are for end-users; this book is for in-the-trenchessys admins. The authors examine how anti-spam methods are implemented onthe client-side (covering Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and UNIX mailclients), server side (covering Exchange and Lotus Notes), and outsourcedoptions including Brightmail and Postini. There is also coverage ofSpamAssassin, a widely deployed open source mail filter which uses a set ofrules to decide how probable it is that a piece of mail is spam.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Real Anti-Spam Help for System Administrators

In Slamming Spam, two spam fighters show you how to fight back—and win. Unlike most spam books, this one is written specifically for in-the-trenches system administrators: professionals who need hands-on solutions for detecting, managing, and deterring spam in Unix/Linux and/or Microsoft Windows environments.

The authors offer deep, administrator-focused coverage of the most valuable open-source tools for reducing spam's impact in the enterprise—especially SpamAssassin. Drawing on their extensive experience in developing and implementing anti-spam tools, the authors present expert insights into every leading approach to fighting spam, including Bayesian filtering, distributed checksum filtering, and email client filtering.

Coverage includes

• Step-by-step junk mail filtering with Procmail

• Protecting Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Lotus Domino servers from spam

• Making the most of native MTA anti-spam features, including whitelists/blacklists, DNS black hole services, and header checking

• Distributed checksum filtering solutions, including Vipul's Razor and Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse

• McAfee SpamKiller for Lotus Domino

• McAfee SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange

• Implementing and managing SpamAssassin

• Implementing SMTP AUTH, providing effective outbound SMTP authentication and relaying with any mail client; and STARTTLS, encrypting outbound mail content, user names, and passwords

• Sender verification techniques, including challenge/response, special use addresses, and sender compute

• Anti-spam solutions for Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Messenger, and Unix mail clients

Whatever your IT environment and mail platform, Slamming Spam's defense in-depth strategies can help you dramatically reduce spam and all its attendant costs—IT staff time, network/computing resources, and user productivity.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Robert Haskins works for Renesys Corporation, a leader in real-time Internet connectivity monitoring and reporting. Robert has fought spam in many environments, including enterprises, cable modem ISP, network equipment manufacturer, wholesale dialup ISP, competitive local exchange carrier, and traditional ISP. He has presented on the topic of fighting spam at NANOG, FBI Boston Infragard, and LISA. Robert writes the "ISPadmin" column for USENIX's ;login:. He is a member of USENIX, SAGE, and IEEE.

Dale Nielsen is a partner in Avacoda, LLC, a consulting company specializing in systems administration and software development. He has more than twenty years of experience administering Unix- and Linux-based mail servers, firewalls, and workstations. He has worked in a variety of engineering and software development environments and has taught courses in systems administration at Sun Microsystems. Recently, he's done consulting work for clients such as Nortel Networks and Ziplink. He has written about Linux-based firewalls for the Linux Journal.

Robert and Dale developed a patent-pending anti-spam software solution for Ziplink, Inc.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (December 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131467166
• ISBN-13: 978-0131467163
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,150,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good resource for messaging systems administrators, November 1, 2005

By 

Ben Rothke "Author of 'Computer Security: 20 ... (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators (Paperback)

Be it inane e-mails with topics such as "retention bobble cicada emanuel," attempts to pitch 21st century snake oil, or incessant pleas to refinance your mortgage or find a date online, we've all received our share of spam. And as antispam software develops, mass marketers get ever more crafty in defeating these programs. Spam is truly overwhelming today's workplaces, and systems administrators are in dire need of effective solutions.

One place to turn is Slamming Spam, a systems administrator's and messaging administrator's guide to reducing spam. With its hands-on, high-level approach for detecting, managing, and eliminating spam, the book is not for beginners. Readers are expected to be comfortable with UNIX and Windows system administration and be familiar with core concepts of messaging and messaging protocols.

Thankfully, the authors don't delay in providing helpful information. By chapter two, the book is already in the solutions phase of how to harden a system against spam. Besides covering SpamAssassin, a popular open-source antispam tool, the book shows how to protect messaging systems, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, and messaging clients including Outlook Express and Mozilla Messenger.

Alternative solutions to junk e-mail are provided as well, including Sender Policy Framework (which identifies spoofed mail) and DSPAM (an open-source statistics-based spam filter), as well as commercial solutions. Whitelists and blacklists, DNS black-hole services, header checking, and other antispam niceties are explained as well. The result is a book that will help any organization substantially reduce its spam intake.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice Read, May 2, 2005

By 

Niloufer Tamboly - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators (Paperback)

I was naive to believe that stricter laws would decrease spam. Now I think that while stricter laws may not decrease the amount of spam that spammers send, they can certainly help filters to decrease the amount of spam that recipients actually see.

The Bayes theorem used to fight spam by most of the spam filters of the day finds its roots in 1763 when a year after his death the work of Thomas Bayes was published. The development of probability theory in the early 18th century arose to answer questions in gambling, and to underpin the new and related ideas of insurance. A problem arose, known as the question of inverse probability: the mathematicians of the time knew how to find the probability that, say, 4 people aged 50 die in a given year out of a sample of 60 if the probability of any one of them dying was known. But they did not know how to find the probability of one 50-year old dying based on the observation that 4 had died out of 60.
Like many educated men of his time, Bayes was both a clergyman and an amateur scientist/mathematician. His solution, known as Bayes' theorem, underlies, and gave its name to, the modern Bayesian approach to the analysis of all kinds of data.

A nice read to understand the ongoing battle against spam.

Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book for admins, February 9, 2005

By 

Dr Anton Chuvakin "Dr. Anton Chuvakin" (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slamming Spam: A Guide for System Administrators (Paperback)

When opening the book, I was convinced that spam doesn't really deserve a book. However, I enjoyed scanning through this "Slamming Spam" and picked up an idea or two from it.

I liked the chapters on Bayesian methods, and I think that this book contains one of the clearest explanations on how they work and how to make them work for you.

Overall, the book is very practical and will be great for people configuring mails servers for spam-fighting on a daily basis. However, this is not an in-depth review, since I am not tasked with fighting spam (and SpamAssassin does a fine job on my mail account).

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH, GCFA is a Security Strategist with a major security company. He is an author of the book "Security Warrior" and a contributor to "Know Your Enemy II". In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org