[Mimedefang] Accept mail before processing

[Jan Pieter Cornet]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 02:40:44PM -0500, Joseph Brennan wrote:
> "David F. Skoll" <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:
> 
> >That's a good idea.  Unfortunately, a server running MIMEDefang is not
> >very good for accepting connections directly from MUAs.
> 
> It's been working well for us.  Maybe we're just throwing enough
> hardware at it.  Two Sun 280s and a 210 handle about 150,000
> messages a day.

Same here. Our outgoing servers are doing virus scanning (using
3 different scanners), and from/to address verification before
accepting the email, all with negligible delays (on average
around 900 msec for all of this).

Full blown spam filtering is probably not very useful for mail
servers where MUAs connect, because of the additional delays,
so I wouldn't recommend that. But even SA only adds around .5 second
in our setup.

In case of excessive delays (i'd call 2 seconds average excessive),
you'd better find out where the delays are coming from. Have you
followed all the necessary protocol? Minslaves set high enough?
is /var/spool/MIMEDefang a RAM disk? Does the machine(s) have
enough RAM? Are the virus scanners using a RAM disk for their
temporary files, and not /tmp? Are you running a good caching
nameserver on the machine itself?

-- 
Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc at xs4all.nl>
!! Disc lamer: The addressee of this email is not the intended recipient. !!
!! This is only a test of the echelon and data retention systems. Please  !!
!! archive this message indefinately to allow verification of the logs.   !!