[Mimedefang] large systems

[Cor Bosman]

> We do run spamassasin, DCC and several in-house "spam signature" based
> systems to allow us to block a little over 99% of spam and porn with few
> false positives and fairly low hardware needs.

Do you run all these from mimedefang? Is your mimedefang-filter public? :)
And do you block or add headers? We allow customers the choice. Some want
to reject, some want to just see a header. 

> I think the input I can give you is that mimedefang is a good way to go
> if you have good perl and DB people and engineer the system well.  As
> long as you do not let the milter hang waiting for a response from a
> sluggish spam check, like an overloaded RBL it really takes very little
> time.  Average time for all processing of a message that hits every test
> is 300 MS.  
> 
> But before I worked to control the ability of an RBL or other internet
> resource to slow it down I sometimes saw 10 second times - and would
> have 700-800 sendmail threads running per server after a minute or so...

How did you control that? We try and prevent it by running local mirrors
of all the RBLs we use. 

Cor