ISPConfig 3 is an excellent alternative to Plesk or cPanel, but the base install consumes just over 500MB of RAM when idle. By disabling ClamAV (email anti-virus), and Amavis (one of the two email spam filters), you can save about 150MB of server memory. The Ubuntu 10.10 budget VPS used for making this guide has 512MB of RAM (1042MB burst), and went from 502MB usage to 347MB usage simply by disabling ClamAV and Amavis! That's huge.
Note that you'll still have spam protection by way of the DNS blacklists option, and you should honestly run anti-virus protection local to your desktop/laptop computer -- not on the server. (It also helps if you're intelligent about email, and know not to just open any random file you're sent by strangers.)
Using your favorite text editor (I'm using
vi), you'll simply edit one file, then disable the unneeded services via command-line.
Remember your basic vi commands:
Press
i to edit the text file.
Press
ESC to exit edit mode.
After escaping, type
:w to save changes.
Then
:q to quit the editor.
Edit Postfix to stop using Amavis. Type this into your shell (SSH) console window:
Code:
vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
Add the "#" symbol in front of two entries in the Postfix configuration file, to "comment out" the unneeded lines of code. Note that commenting out is preferred to deleting -- in case you change your mind later. These two lines should appear at the very end of the conf file.
Code:
# content_filter = amavis:[127.0.0.1]:10024
# receive_override_options = no_address_mappings
Save, go back to console.
Restart Postfix with the following command in shell:
Code:
/etc/init.d/postfix restart
One by one, stop each service:
Code:
/etc/init.d/clamav-daemon stop
/etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam stop
/etc/init.d/spamassassin stop
/etc/init.d/amavis stop
Next, disable the startup for ClamAV and Amavis. Again, one at a time:
Code:
update-rc.d -f clamav-daemon remove
update-rc.d -f clamav-freshclam remove
update-rc.d -f spamassassin remove
update-rc.d -f amavis remove
Understand that the spam and anti-virus options will still be visible in ISPConfig 3. However, they will not function, and will be ignored by the server. If you update Postfix or ISPConfig, these changes may be wiped out (files overwritten), and must be repeated.
To block spam, simply use the DNS blacklists option in Postfix, which are generally more effective anyway.
If you still need anti-spam, then either get more RAM for the VPS (768MB or more, base), or consider using a hosted email option like Gmail.
And most important,
USE A GOOD HOST!
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