Spam Free Email

Not too long ago I was working on making erlang connect via ODBC to my MySQL server. I spent 4 days installing and recompiling only to find out that my own erlang code was the problem, not erlang or the ODBC drivers. I figure I wasted 2 days on that, but in the process I really streamlined my installation process.

I now have a set of RPMs that lets me install a minimal version of Fedora Core 4, map a few NFS shares and run one script that installs ODBC, erlang, NTP and a few other things that are needed for everything to run. It also creates my configuration files and a few other settings as well.

From the point of booting off the install DVD to having a working erlang environment configured to communicate with my system it takes 15 to 20 minutes depending on the processor and the person doing the install.

Important stuff for anyone who hopes to be running 20+ erlang nodes within the next 6 months.

As part of this entire project I’ve wanted a good anti-virus solution that I can use to detect viruses in email messages as they go through the system. I’m not interested in using the big boys, because of licensing problems, so I’ve pretty much decided that use clamav.

As part of the licensing agreement to use the clamav libraries I will be releasing the clamav-to-erlang module into open source, or at least releasing my source code for others to use.

My basic idea for it’s implementation will be to pass the text of a file to clamav and get back the results which I will return in some erlang data structure.

Sound like I haven’t done much with it yet? … well I haven’t. It’s all still just a theory and nice thoughts in the back of my own head. Once I get the first rev of the anti-spam server functional (not necessarily finished) I’ll be looking into this further. Best I can tell it’s possible, just going to take a bit of time to make clamav and erlang play nice together

 http://www.clamav.net

Sorry I haven’t written in a bit, but I’ve been coding like a wild man

Just today I got my SMTPD application written in erlang to complete it’s first entire SMTP conversation, that I did not initiate from my test modules. This a huge step for the progress of this site and I’m totally jazzed by it …

While I would not call this an email server yet, this is my first step to that end.

I still need to perfect the processes that I’m going to use for my Queue and a module that I am calling a Profiler that is doing all of my anti-spam processes, of which I am including every technology I can think of to track and prevent spam.

After that it is simply a process of sending the good mail to the end user and removing the bad stuff … Sounds easy, eh?