On Dec 13, 2008, at 10:27 PM, Bill Christensen wrote:
> I know some may disagree with me, but.. > > Up until last January we were hosting all our own email servers (150 > or so domain names, mostly below 10 mail accounts each). The Storm > Worm botnet (250,000 compromised PCs last year at this time) beat the > tar out of them - our fastest Macs couldn't say "go away" fast enough > and were essentially suffering from distributed denial of service > (DDOS), crashing multiple times a day. We were paralized. We service about 500-600 email addresses with two linux-based dual Xeon servers; one runs smtp, rbl filtering/spamassasin/amavis for spam/ antivirus and the other is our imap mail store, which is what clients actually connect to. We routinely delete over 80%-90% of the email sent to our domain. The RBL's are doing the majority of the heavy lifting, and made the biggest performance difference in the setup. Last night our daily stats were: RBL: blocked 95,203 messages SpamAssassin: scanned 12,741 messages of which 11,101 was actual real mail, only 10% of all the mail hitting our servers. We were staggering under that kind of DDOS-like effect before we went to this distributed, staged setup. (The takedown of those spam serving ISP's recently took a big load off of us, too.) IIRC OS X Server comes with just a basic Spamassasin setup to filter email, you need to add the RBL filtering module, but it does wonders. My junk mailbox ends up with 2-6 junk messages a day, and if I ever get off my butt and train the server to whitelist a email newsletter I'm on, it would be zero most of the time. > We moved everything over to Gmail (still using the same domain names > and user addresses. Under 100 accounts is free for the basic > service). It's been great. They have far more computational > firepower to throw against the spam problem than our little server > farm ever could muster. My collection of 15 or so addresses > currently see something like 4 spams a day slip through vs 24,000 to > 40,000 per month that get auto filtered into my Gmail spam folder. > My previous in house anti-spam servers were only catching about half > to two thirds of that, so I was still seeing 300 spam a day sneak > past by the time we finally completed the move. They're using RBL filtering, and you were doing this at the height of the Storm surge. We were very please with how our system managed that...mail delivery stacked up occasionally, but it wasn't enough that people were complaining. I still have issues with storing institutional data on Someone Else's Servers. (Yes Dan, same issue you have with IMAP :-) -- Bruce Johnson "No matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
