[Mimedefang] compare mimedefang to mailscanner

[John Rudd]

Kenneth Irving wrote:

> 
> Although I liked MailScanner, I would use it only in equipments with low
> email traffic. Maybe in your equipment, with that email volume,
> it'll work OK.
> 

My experience is exactly the opposite.  In an environment with .25M to 
1M emails per day, MailScanner did just fine on little SunBlade 150 
workstations (four of them, load balanced).  Sure, the latency (between 
accepting a message, and then handing it to the back-line 
POP/IMAP/Webmail server) could be up to 10-15 minutes, but it didn't get 
any worse than that.

In contrast, trying to run MIMEDefang on those same systems was 
pointless.  In order to run enough child processes to keep up with 1-2 
messages per second, the load would shoot so high that it the systems 
would stop accepting email.


One of the reasons why it took 2 years to move from MailScanner to 
MIMEDefang, at work, was a) the fallout from trying to do it on that 
hardware, b) the upgrade cycle for moving to Sunfire v220's so that the 
systems were fast enough to do the checks during the SMTP session.