Re: Spam

On 05 Feb 2004, at 23:03, Professional Software Engineering wrote:
> At 14:07 2004-02-05 -0700, LuKreme wrote:
> > On 04 Feb 2004, at 14:40, Professional Software Engineering wrote:
> > > For a home user managing their own computer, who the hell wants to 
> > > have to manage a separate host just for mail processing?  Hell, for 
> > > a small business, who wants to do that?
> > What are you talking about?  Spamd does not require a separate host.
> You haven't been following this thread closely have you?
>
> Please refer back to comments about server load.  Run a battery of SA 
> tests on messages and contend with 20-30K messages a day in traffic 
> (not to mention E/SMTP traffic when acting as backup MX for other 
> sites - but those messages are not subjected to SA).  When server 
> loading gets really severe on account of mail filtering, you don't 
> want that happening on a server that is providing other services such 
> as web and user shell, where that CPU bog gives you a bad reputation 
> and interferes with getting things done in a timely fashion.
SA can handle 20-30K messages a day without a problem on any machine 
that can handle that much mail in the first place.  If it can't, the 
person in charge of the mail server is the problem, not SA.
> Just the other day, someone posted here about their mail server 
> getting bogged under the load of their A/V and spam scanning, and was 
> looking to see if procmail could offer a solution.  I cannot imagine 
> waiting 20 minutes, much less *14 hours* for mail to get through.
I certainly don't buy that it was SA responsible for that kind of 
slow-down, and I know of ISPs with at least 10,000 emails/day who are 
not having any problems processing mail through SA on fairly low-end 
hardware (I believe the mailserver is a 700Mhz Celery, but I'm not 1005 
on that).  Reading Dallman's last post on the thread, it sounds like 
he's now not sure WHAT caused the machine to throttle.
One thing he said was "I mean, we do have a few thousand shell users, 
*many* of whom are running spamc/spamd via procmail or their .forwards" 
which could, in itself, be a problem, depending on exactly how it's 
configured.  spamd should be run only ONCE per host, of course, and 
spamc merely connects to it.  If users are running their on spamd's 
then that could certainly cause problems.  that seem unlikely, however.
> As more tests are added to SA, it's going to get larger and slower, 
> unless they make a significant change in the design.
SA is pretty smart about its processing, and the change _always_ skip 
large messages added to spamc in 2.60 (I think it was 2.60) has done a 
lot to alleviate problems of clueless mailadmins.
OTOH, if I was admining a server getting 25K messages a day I'd 
probably want mutliple hosts.
--
You know, in a world in which Bush and Blair can be nominated for the 
Nobel Peace Prize, "for having dared to take the necessary decision to 
launch a war on Iraq without having the support of the UN" I find 
myself agreeing with Tom Lehrer: satire is dead. - Neil Gaiman

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