On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Forrest Aldrich wrote: > I've been asked to design a fairly large email gatewaying system, for > which antispam measures are required. I'd like to hear from others > about any issues notes etc regarding scaling SpamAssassin to this sort > of level... hardware requirements, kernel tuning (I'm using FreeBSD), > good and bad issues, perhaps even commercial alternatives.
We move about 2 million emails inbound/month, and 1 million outbound/month. Our MTAs are 3 linux boxes running sendmail, and pass emails into our internal mail system which stores user mailboxes (about 15000). Each MTA runs MIMEDefang and SpamAssassin. Each box does a site-wide Bayes. Our email is evenly distributed across the 3 MTAs so they don't really need to share the Bayes dbs, and we've never seen a problem with each MTA having its own corpus. Bayes works REALLY well for us, and has virtually eliminated our false positives and needs to whitelist. Each MTA also does SpamAss network tests. We do NO scanning of outbound mail. Virus scanning is handled by the internal mail system, as we have not yet needed to do virus scanning on the Internet MTAs. I must really stress that it is MIMEDefang that allows us to process this kind of load. I tried one other milter and it crashed constantly. MD is rock solid, because it codes around the non-solidity of perl. ;-) Matt -- Matthew S. Cramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Office: 717-396-5032 Infrastructure Security Analyst Fax: 717-396-5590 Armstrong World Industries, Inc. Cell: 717-917-7099
