Re: [IMail Forum] OT: Windows-based SMTP gateway

[Matt]

Not exactly.  MS SMTP handles the load with ease.  Being that it is very thin for an MTA and a mature native service, the thing could process many times the volume that IMail could on the same box, probably 10 times the amount if not more, and there is no unnatural limit imposed on MS SMTP whereas IMail probably couldn't handle more than 1 million messages a day in a normal traffic pattern on a box regardless of hardware used due to the connection limitations.  Does that mean that I think that MS SMTP could handle 10 million E-mails a day with suitable hardware?  The answer is yes, I think it could.  I know that IIS is certainly capable of many times that number of hits and does so with a great deal of ease and low utilization unless scripted. The reason for ORF is purely to do address validation.  Personally I use it for nothing else, and unfortunately it isn't yet fully implemented due to complexities in pulling together the data from dozens of sources and needing to manage it in a custom process.  My installation runs on my IMail box, but IMail is on an alternative port that is redirected by our router when direct connections are needed for POP3 and SMTP.  I can tell you first hand that the MS SMTP impact along with ORF is unnoticeable.  An added benefit of this configuration is that I now support SMTP connections on an alternative port so that customers on networks like Earthlink and Cox can still use my SMTP server for sending E-mail when port 25 is being blocked. I don't use ORF for blacklisting anything but invalid users.  I am under the belief that it operates as a pure blacklist, no weighting or combinations, if it fails one test, it fails.  This is grossly ineffective and only as accurate as the tests that you use.  Personally, I trust none to the degree of blocking at the gateway for a single hit.  I would not recommend using ORF for anti-spam, but instead just simply a gateway. Note that MS SMTP is also a more capable and more flexible outgoing SMTP server than IMail, and many with high volume servers have moved to having IMail hand off to MS SMTP for this reason. If someone is looking to do pre-blocking of spam on a gateway, it would seem that a separate Linux box would be the best way to go and the most cost efficient.  We rely on a Declude setup ourselves, but being behind IMail it has no control over the SMTP connection and address validation can't be done realistically for a large number of gatewayed domains.  Sandy has a kludge for this of course, and it would work well enough for a select number of domains, and of course no kludge is necessary if all E-mail is locally hosted because IMail will do address validation on it's own hosted accounts. So I really only recommend ORF + MS SMTP for situations where address validation is not supported by IMail (gatewayed domains) or just plain MS SMTP for outgoing SMTP on high volume IMail servers. Matt Darin Cox wrote: I think that's why several people recommended ORF with it...to reduce the impact of a dictionary attack. Several others have posted info about the excellent capabilities of MS SMTP. Darin. ----- Original Message ----- From: "S.J.Stanaitis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <IMail_Forum@list.ipswitch.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 3:07 PM Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] OT: Windows-based SMTP gateway NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Unless they actually improved over the last release of IIS... IIS SMTP is only good if you have a betting pool where you're all wagering on how many minutes before it gets overloaded and dies. With the amount of email you're pushing, don't bother. One good dictionary attack on top of your ordinary load and IIS SMTP is kaput. Sam Jeff Andreou wrote: We currently have a linux machine running exim as a gateway for our iMail server. I was asked to investigate windows-based alternatives and was wondering if any of you out there have suggestions. Would MS-SMTP on a 2003 machine be able to keep up in terms of efficiency and functionality? We currently process about 200k emails a day, only 80k of which make it to the iMail server. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Jeff Andreou Support Technician ClarityConnect Inc 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/ -- ===================================================== MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro. http://www.mailpure.com/software/ =====================================================