From mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue May 29 20:49:35 2007 From: mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Julian Field) Date: Tue May 29 21:05:33 2007 Subject: ANNOUNCE: BarricadeMX is released Message-ID: Fort Systems Limited is proud to introduce its newest flagship software, BarricadeMX. Featuring a new level of spam filtering which rejects most of the spam before it's even accepted for delivery, BarricadeMX is the top of the line anti-spam filtering application. BarricadeMX was designed to complement MailScanner and SpamAssassin for high volume sites and / or sites which require very accurate spam detection. BarricadeMX was jointly developed by Fort Systems Ltd and SnertSoft to more efficiently block spam at the MTA level during the initial SMTP conversation. BarricadeMX can be installed with MailScanner, any other MTA or placed in front of any existing anti- spam solution. Since this has been a very active recent topic on the MailScanner list we hope you will find this information to be useful. A quick overview of the product follows and more information regarding BarricadeMX can be found at www.fsl.com or www.snertsoft.com. BarricadeMX is a new lightweight, small footprint computer-based anti- spam application. It is designed as an SMTP port 25 proxy, filtering and forwarding mail to one or more local or remote mail transfer agents. BarricadeMX supports a variety of well blended anti-spam filtering tests that can be individually enabled or disabled according to the rigors of the postmaster's local filtering policy. Most of these tests are optional and several are configurable by Domain. BarricadeMX can also set limits on message size by sender, recipient, domain, IP address and IP address ranges. The application itself is a small (4 MB resident memory), lightweight, multi-threaded C program. Much more efficient than the typical MTA, it can gracefully handle many simultaneous incoming connections. A single CPU system has handled 1018 concurrent SMTP client connections without failing or losing any legitimate mail. Many servers that are in production routinely handle 200 to 300 incoming simultaneous connections while maintaining low CPU utilization. BarricadeMX may be configured to run on multiple gateways which share multicast or unicast caches. These caches provide a fast, simple, and efficient means to share cache updates across multiple gateways on the same network segment or back and forth to a set of remote hosts. Both the multicast and unicast caches use a broadcast-and-correct model and support IPv4 and IPv6. By rejecting messages with a 550 error at the MTA level during the initial SMTP conversation, valid senders should receive a rejection notice letting them know that their email was not accepted for delivery and the reason for the rejection. Since this notice is sent directly to the server trying to deliver the message, there is no chance this feature being used in a ?reflected spam? attack. The rejection notice may also be customized for individual sites to let the recipient of the bounce know who to contact to correct the problem. BarricadeMX is currently available only for Linux Red Hat and CentOS and OpenBSD operating systems. Ports to FreeBSD, SuSE and Solaris will be available soon with ports to Microsoft and Mac OS X in the planning stage. BarricadeMX is supplied as an rpm install for Linux and it is configured and managed using a simple web interface or by using text configuration files. For FreeBSD it is installed using pkg_add and configured by using text configuration files. And finally here are the results from one of our beta sites. Before installing BarricadeMX this site was running 15 very expensive PC anti-spam gateways which were barely able to handle the load. There were long delays caused by a load of approximately 2 million total messages per day for +1,800 domains. Peak connection attempts typically reached +100,000 connections per hour. The 15 PC gateways have now been replaced be three Sun 2100?s with single Dual-Core AMD Opteron 1210 processors and 4 GB of memory running the CentOS 4.x x86_64 operating system, BarricadeMX and a typical MailScanner anti-spam installation. Gateway 1 is running BarricadeMX, a typical MailScanner / SpamAssassin installation and MailWatch. It is also the Gateway cluster?s log host, web server and MailWatch database server. Gateways 2 and 3 are running BarricadeMX and a typical MailScanner / SpamAssassin installation. And here are recent statistics from this beta site: Gateway 1 Gateway 2 Gateway 3 Site Totals Delivery Attempts 4,052,718 15,067,573 3,719,411 22,839,702 Accepted messages 89,999 177,359 53,705 321,063 Accepted messages 2.22% 1.18% 1.44% 1.61% Connections per day 579,160 747,604 532,078 1,858,842 Max Simultaneous Connections 506 506 506 506 Process Age (seconds) 604,591 1,741,347 603,966 N.A. Connections per second 6.70 8.65 6.16 21.51 Connections per hour 24,132 31,150 22,170 77,452 Connections per Day 720,021 521,808 572,566 1,814,395 Daily Bandwidth savings (KB) 11,377,738 8,223,877 8,949,527 28,551,142 Load Average 1.0 to 2.0 1.0 to 2.0 0.5 to 1.5 under 2.0 This is a site that gets a massive amount of spam and is currently accurately rejecting over 98% of the spam at the MTA level. We have had less than ten sites that needed to be white listed as false positives in just over two months. We estimate that each of these servers can easily handle over 1,000,000 messages per day. After passing through BarricadeMX, MailScanner is only processing an average of 39,226 messages per day out of 1,814,395 average daily connection attempts, 1,940 (4.95%) of which are tagged as spam and 89 (0.23%) of which are quarantined as viruses. The client reports getting ?virtually no spam?. A white paper with more information and pricing is available at http://www.fsl.com . For more information and pricing please contact us off list at info@www.fsl.com . Julian Field, MEng CITP Chief Technology Officer Fort System Ltd. Steve Swaney President Fort Systems Ltd. Steve@fsl.com www.fsl.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. For all your IT requirements visit www.transtec.co.uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner-announce/attachments/20070529/b0920693/attachment-0001.html