>Our server currently processes about 160,000 pieces of mail a day. >The .gse files were becoming a problem for us as there were about >100 being generated every three minutes or so with virtually all >being from spam sources with invalid addresses. This equates to >2,000 an hour, or 48,000 each day. Further, with each pending >outbound message being queued and tried six times, this works out >to something like 300,000 SMTP processes a day. Not a good thing.
Of course not. That's backoffce/plumbing work that should be offloaded from at box that is directly providing user services. The abuse situation is really accelerating. I think as a lot of mail servers set up defenses, the abusers just keep hosing out more and more volumes since it's becoming harder for them to deliver the volumes they get paid for. For a mail server with your level of traffic and abuse, you really ought to think about IMGate. >One of my staff members wrote a routine in Visual Basic which runs >once every five minutes, looking for .gse files which are more than >three minutes old. By doing this we allow all bounce messages to be >tried once (so valid bounces are usually delivered) but the others >are killed before they get tried over and over and over again. (Our >queue timer is set for 10 minutes on the gateway server.) well, that's one approach, but wouldn't the best approach be NOT to have those tons crap arrive on your users' mailbox server at all?? IMgate's mailqueue handling is simply, demonstrably superior to Imail's single directory approach. I helped one Imail ISP last week whose IMGate, which had served for months without problem, got overpowered by a huge amount of abuse (64 Mb machine, single ata33 disk). He had 41 K msgs in his mailqueue. All he to do up to 256 Mb RAM to run more processes. It then took over 12 hours for the queue to empty to normal levels. For those hours, his single, slow disk was pegged solid, and new mail was passing through normally as well (IMGate let's new mail pass through quickly, while deferred mail is handled with second priority). IMGate never missed a beat, not one message lost, not one reboot, etc, etc. and now the delay through IMGate is the normal sub-3 seconds. Len To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
