I have a computer running as my firewall. I am using Astaro's now know as "Sophos" Home "FREE" firewall. This takes care of alot of problems for me and my family. I also run 2 mailservers "Debian" These are one in front of the other. I do not get spam at all. I may get a message or 2 if I sign up for something but after a couple of days I usually have it covered. My question is am I not normal to have these things. The computers are not that old. They are my old set-ups from the previous year or two. My new Spam filter is using a 360 gig? SATA6 drive with 12 gigs of ram. But I look at all of these questions about "I have been hacked" I do not think I have had to worry about this for years. I get approx 400 emails a day through my personal server serving 4 people. Are most of you putting these servers up in a company environment? or are they for home as mine are even though I am running a fix it business from home.
hum that's a big waste of resource in corporate world that's why fashion world these day is virtualization on that 12 gigs of ram if ti's with old high end cpu you can bring up easily 6 - 1 gig ram - 1g vspap openvz vps-s even without overcommitment of resources and get 12 if you over commit with better performance than casual low end vps provider just get second hdd for software raid 1.... for a mail server 256, 256 is enough (i give example with open vz cause it's simple and fast and reliable enough) for spam filtering i use spammassinn with hashing plugins razor, pyzor, dcc and ixhash and got verry good results, calmav scanning and some tunnig to mail server to emulate baracuda spam firewall http://technotes.trostfamily.org/?p=184 (tat's on my last cpanel vps there is no cpanel tutorital in same blog) BTW People get hacked cause they do not do regular updates or use windows and download click on viruses (or in some rare cases there are zero day exploits)...
I kinda knew I was over doing it but you must admit "I hope" if we all could afford it wouldn't you build one from your old system. I just use say for my firewall I use and AMD chip 3.0 GHz or so with 4 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hdd from an old system 5 years ago I think. My latest server was actually given to us from my wife's work. Although not a great desktop it certainly is great for an email server. IBM Think Center. This had 2 gigs of ram I upgraded to 4 tried 8 but it did not like it so 4 gigs it is. It came with a 300 + gig sata6 I swapped it out and am using a 250 gig wd hdd. And my as I call it real mail server where I get my mail from is my old machine from 2-3 years ago. An Intel K chip that is actually faster than the one I currently use but 2 generations older. I have found it hard to sell stuff to people these days and trust them as well. This is why I have all of these parts. My wife would love it if I got rid of half of my stuff. LOL. BTW I was using Howtoforge setup for mailservers and Scrollout F1 for spam and virus control but I have changed back to Debian Anti-Spam Anti-Virus Gateway Email Server using Postfix, Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, Razor, DCC, Pyzor, and ClamAV For the first server mail will get to and this on Virtual 3 Debian squeeze Postfix Virtual mailbox domains with PostfixAdmin, MySQL, Dovecot IMAP/POP3, Amavisd-new, SquirrelMail and MailZu for my server I get my mail from. I have also tried to backup all of my mail and have not had much luck until I started to use Set Up Rsnapshot, Archiving Of Snapshots And Backup Of MySQL Databases On Debian
What I think is funny or something like that is that I have tried several different setups from HowtoForge and other places. Also I just tried Scrollout F1 which I REALLY like. But I have noticed that with the set up information from this setup it gives me less spam and no virus's out of the box "If you will" I am running a company from home so I am home a lot and I redo setups a lot as well. I have not found one that works as good as the ones I use. I will say I love the control panel ISPConfig 3 and the ease of use it gives me especially the anti-spam settings I love. I am trying to set it up on my system as we speak but I am sure I will redo my system once they send out another how-to. BTW I gave up on the last on because for the first time I was not able to get Bind9 to work because they said "You must have a real IP or use the one that comes as your IP" At that point I gave up since I have NEVER had a problem with the other set up. Please to all keep doing what you do I love reading and trying them out.