The next version of LISTSERV will have support for a spam exit inside SMTPL. Actually, this code was written shortly before the 15.0 release to deal with a sudden three-fold increase in spam to LSOFT.COM (I guess we are not very popular among the spam community). It was not quite ready for general release back then (not enough configuration flexibility and no documentation, not to mention limited testing), so we did not include it in 15.0. In a nutshell, you create a spam exit that runs incoming messages through the spam filter of your choice and tells SMTPL what to do with them. SMTPL can run an arbitrary but limitable number of scans in parallel, and rejects bad messages on the wire. It has cut incoming mail to LISTSERV by 75-85%. The main problem has been that I got a lot of heat when I phased in the system. This was a surprise because we had applied spam filtering to incoming mail for years, and I did not change the filter at all. The only thing that had changed, from my perspective, was that it that it was now highly parallel and we no longer had mail queues during peak hours (and the legitimate complaints that came with them - and these complaints did stop as the new SMTPL solved that problem). But there was another change I had not thought of. By rejecting spam on the wire, SMTPL was causing bounces to be generated in the rare cases where the message was not spam, but was sent from a blacklisted mail server. Previously, these senders were unaware that their messages were being filtered. Surely they must have noticed that there never was any reply no matter how many times they resent, but they just did not complain about it. Now, suddenly the world was ending, and it was all my fault. I can't count the number of times I said that the new system was here to stay and was exactly the same filtering we had had for years, except serially. In the end, I treated these complaints like spam and just hit the delete button. Over the course of several months, the main disgruntled senders realized that their mail was silently dropped by quite a few other organizations, and that it was a pointless fight for them to demand that the entire world change their spam settings to whitelist the public ISP server they were sharing with thousands of random consumer accounts. And why would they? These servers do deliver quite a lot of spam. Once these unfortunate senders set up their own mail servers, the false positives went away and so did the complaints. But you should plan for these complaints if the filtering is visible. Anyway, you can contact me privately if you want to beta-test this SMTPL as an alternative to buying hardware. We have been running it live for about six months, so I am confident that it works fine, but you do have to write you own exit to query the spam filtering system. I have one in REXX for SpamAssassin. Eric