[Mimedefang] compare mimedefang to mailscanner

[Kenneth Irving]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, John Rudd wrote:

> 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.
>

That's an interesting observation, and shows another difference between
these two mail filters: MIMEDefang is great for filtering email on the
fly, and you can reject or drop messages during SMTP, while with
Mailscanner you can accumulate emails and take more time to process each
one, if you don't mind the latency time (which some users do mind... some
get very impatient).

I find that both, Mailscanner and MIMEDefang are very good mail filters,
different but very good. Personally I prefer MIMEDefang, but in a case
such as the one John is presenting... I think I would take the same
decision.


>
> 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.
>
>
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