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My mail server appears to be running solidly now and so has made the trip from under my desk to in the wardrobe under the washing basket. In addition as the fetchmail/exim/procmail/imapd combo it was running before it is now running SpamAssassin.

However, SpamAssassin has brought up one of the problems with running Debian/Stable: it may be very stable, but it is also rather old. The version of SpamAssassin is way out of date. So is the version of exim. This is kind of annoying since spammers have advanced beyond what version very-old can provide. Also there have been some nice patches integrated into exim that provide good hooks for exim into SpamAssassin and virus scanners, two useful tools.

So I am coming to the conclusion that my best bet might be to upgrade to Debian/Testing or Unstable, whichever the “just a little less stable” version of Debian is (I always seem to get it wrong). Then I can have nice baysian spam filtering, which proved very sucessful in Thunderbird. Having done in-situ on the server would be good because it would mean that I would not have to train lots of different mail-client spam filters.

A worthwhile trade for having weeks worth of uptime rather than months, I’m sure you will agree. Saying that, it’s not doing much so I’ll hopefully get months of uptime anyways. Considering all the IMAP email servers I could get running on WinXP seemed to have a maximum of two days uptime, it’s not so bad -_^

Time to get reading docs and man pages again I think…