Few general questions about Mailscanner

[James Gray]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:49 am, Jason Williams wrote:
> Hello everyone. Im new to the list as well as Mailscanner.
>
> A friend of mine told me that I might be interested in using mailscanner
> for our company email. After reading a few of the docs on the site, I
> have to say, I am very interested about the possiblity of using
> mailscanner for our mail gateway.
>
> I do have just a few questions that I was hoping to ask here and get some
> feedback.
>
> If I do use mailscanner, it will be running on FreeBSD 4.9. I see it is
> already built into the ports tree and has the latest version. (Ports make
> life so easy. :) )
>
> Anyway, the server it would be running on has the following specs:
>
> PIII 1ghz
> 2gig RAM
> 2 18gig SCSI drives

That's a nice box :)  Our mail gateway is a Compaq DL360 with 1.2GHz Xeon,
1Gb RAM and a 36Gb hardware RAID 0+1 (with a 128Mb cache on the RAID
controller and a hot spare).  We're running FreeBSD 4.6 and MailScanner
(the ports version - 4.23 IIRC).  We're also running NAI VirusScan 7 for
fBSD and SpamAssassin 2.6 (ports version again) with MailScanner.
Interesting to note that we never use ANY swap space - the whole thing runs
in RAM.  You've got double our RAM so unless you change your mind and run
Windows, you'll be seeing similar numbers to us.

Our gateway also runs an IMAP server on it's internal interface as a backup
for I.T. people (I.T staff have two mail stores, just in case the Exchange
box goes bang).  The gateway currently handles 7 domains and about 35,000
messages a day totalling about 2.5-3Gb.  We catch about 25,000 spam
messages a day and roughly 1500 viruses with a total false positive/false
negative rate of less than 0.01%.  I have 16 pending filter modifications
after being on leave for 2 weeks - 14 days and approx 490,000 messages with
16 false +ve's/-ve's = 0.003%.  Pretty good!

The system load rarely breaks past 0.5 and usually sits at about 0.05-0.1 :)
Given that your machine is a very similar spec, I doubt your numbers will
be very different to ours.

I found the hardest part of our config was getting all the Perl crap sorted
for SpamAssassin.  My suggestion is use ports to install Perl 5.8, then
track down the correct ports packages for the perl modules SpamAssassin
needs.  If there are any modules not in the ports tree (there might be 1 or
2) use CPAN last to grab them.  Other than that the whole thing was a piece
of cake!

--James
__________________________________
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"Largely because it is so tangible and exciting a program and as such will
serve to keep alive the interest and enthusiasm of the whole spectrum of
society...It is justified because...the program can give a sense of shared
adventure and achievement to the society at large."
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