Mailserver Setup Revision as of Thursday, 28 May 2026 at 13:06 UTC

Set up with Postfix, Postgrey, Dovecot, Cyrus SASL, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, Amavisd-new, and Fail2Ban on CentOS 6.4.

Here’s a great guide (cached).

Billy Gorbachev’s options:

• OpenBSD. Eliminates need for fail2ban, since pf has this
  functionality built in.
• qmail, not Postfix.
• OpenBSD spamd, not Postgrey. spamd hurts spammers more, and hurts
  legit senders less. logs are hilarious, e.g. 178.33.129.117:
  disconnected after 3995 seconds. lists: spamd-greytrap
• Replace spamassassin with Spamhaus hooks in qmail (tcpserver).
• qmail-pop3d, not Dovecot. Dovecot has a poor security track record.
  Download mail over (pop3 over CurveCP), using fetchmail + CurveCP
  command-line tools. Store locally in Maildir, backup
  as necessary/desired.
• drop ClamAV and Amavisd. Run FreeBSD or OpenBSD on your desktop.
• Add GnuPG to your local mail client.
• Add Spamhaus DROP and eDROP to network edge pf tables
  http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/
• Add a TXT SPF record for your domain, including your servers,
  followed by “-all”

Several of these changes can be made (SPF record, DROP, GnuPG) without modifying your existing setup.