SpamJadoo: Anti-Spam Solution

Its unique way of validating e-mails makes this solution stand apart from other content-filter based products. Moreover, it also provides an option for integrating an anti-virus to the mail server

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

SpamJadoo, a Linux based anti-spam software requires an Orion Application Server to run. This Application Server doesn't come embedded with the package, but can be downloaded for free from the Internet. With SpamJadoo you can add anti-virus protection to your mail server. For this, integrate ClamAV( an AV solution available freely on Internet) and this needs to be downloaded and installed separately. To check whether a mail is a spam or not, this utility checks for 'reverse DNS lookup;' and also checks if the address of the incoming mail is available in the address book.

The way an e-mail ID is added to the spam list of this software is unique. When a SpamJadoo user gets a mail from an e-mail ID for the first time, a 'Mail Server Busy' message is sent back to the sender's mail server. Meanwhile, it adds the sender e-mail ID to the'invalidated' e-mail list. If the sender's mail server resends the mail to SpamJadoo, it accepts the mail and moves to the 'validated' e-mail list. So, the next time the recipient receives a mail from the same ID, it doesn't gets blocked. Further, the mail goes for content filtering and Bayesian analysis, but for this, the two options must be activated.

Initially the keywords database for content filtering in SpamJadoo is empty and doesn't have any global pool for the content filtering, which can be an advantage. For example, there are a few words that are considered abusive within an IT enterprise, but in medical field those words are acceptable. So, this software will add keywords to the database of its content filter depending upon the mails that are marked by the recipient as spam. To upload a list of  keywords for content filtering, one can take help from SpamJadoo engineers.

For testing this anti-spam software, we installed it on a system having an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, and used Fedora 7 as OS. We first sent a couple of mails from different e-mail IDs, which this software added to the invalid e-mail list at first glance. When the test mail server tried to resend e-mails, it accepted them and added them to the valid ID list. To check its anti-spam capabilities we also defined a few keywords, for which results were satisfactory. It has support for scanning PDF based spam and detected them well. However, support for image based spam was missing.

Apart fromthe list of valid and invalid e-mail ids, SpamJadoo also has a pre-approved list where you can validate an e-mail address

Bottomline: Its unique way of validating e-mail ensures better performance.

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