ANNOUNCE: BarricadeMX is released

[Julian Field]

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 at www.fsl.com .

Julian Field, MEng CITP
Chief Technology Officer
Fort System Ltd.

Steve Swaney
President
Fort Systems Ltd.
Steve at 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

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