[nos-bbs] This thread about adding spam support to JNOS ...

[maiko at pcs.mb.ca]

Hi,

The question perhaps is, is it really worth the effort to add anti-
spam support to JNOS or TNOS for that matter ? Personally, I'm not
terribly enthusiatic about that aspect of NOS. My interest in NOS
has always been as a ROUTER, and not much more. But, let's talk
about this anyways ... I'm just going to toss some ideas out.

a) I'm not terribly interested because there *might* be better
   alternatives instead of reinventing the wheel. Many are now
   setting up MX gateways which spam filter EVERYTHING, forwarding
   it to some end destination smtp server. Perhaps bolster the
   filtering capabilities of the JNOS server (so that it can redirect
   mail that has been MARKED or HEADER TAGGED as spam), but leave
   the spam processing external on some other box.

b) Perhaps we could put a hook into the NOS smtp, for something like
   SPAM ASSASSIN similar to how postfix does it ? Run a smapd server
   on linux then have JNOS hook into postfix using the filter.sh in
   the postfix distribution.

   BUT WAIT - what about DOS users ?

c) Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current implementation
   of smtp services in JNOS is very likely very out of date and not
   to specification. IF *we* plan on doing anything with it, perhaps
   the first thing to do is to completely REPLACE the smtp service.

   1) Perhaps Barry (K2MF) wouldn't mind us dumping the JNOS services
   and putting in his MFNOS smtp variant in place. From what I under
   stand, Barry has pain stakingly tried his best to keep his SMTP
   server to specification, and he has some nice features to boot.

d) A radical approach is to maybe ask ourselves, which of the TCP/IP
   services used in NOS really should be contained within NOS anymore
   now that linux has come by.

   BUT WAIT - What about DOS users (again). They certainly would
   expect a monolithic application that has all the services like
   smtp, ftp, http that they really could not run any other way
   in DOS anyways (or could they ???).

   For linux, there are probably alot better implementation of SMTP
   available, why use the JNOS one then ??? I hope that I'm not going
   to start a war of words on this one. I'm just thinking outload, want
   to know what others think about this ?

Just my 2 million dollars worth ...

Maiko