MailScanner -> Spamassassin taking insane amount of bandwidth

Fri Feb 13 00:54:44 GMT 2004

This may seem like a bit of a stretch but I recently had a similar problem
(increase in traffic by over 200%) when I integrated a new domain into my
system.  The domain was relatively new and had few users so I couldn't
fathom the load increase.

A week later I was able to trace the problem down to a user who had their
account closed with a rule in exchange to forward the mail out to an
internet account.  Eventually this internet account became full and started
to generate mailbox full bounce messages, which in turn eventually filled up
the users mailbox on my exchange system which also started spewing out
mailbox full messages.  These messages would bounce very quickly between
boxes, apending the bounce message to the bottom of the message each time.
The bounce messages would replicate up to about 2.5 MB in size in 5k
increments in under 10 minutes for each message the user received.  As you
can imagine, this had a major impact on mail traffic.

I would recommend going through a slice of your maillog to see if you can
recognize a pattern.  It may be that you process a lot of very small
messages and spam assassin is generating detailed reports in the headers
which is the source of your problem.

  _____

From: David Hooton [mailto:david at PLATFORMHOSTING.COM]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 5:55 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: MailScanner -> Spamassassin taking insane amount of bandwidth

Have you perhaps considered that the last month's mail traffic has increased
fairly significantly?  MyDoom on it's own was more than half of our traffic
for a day or so.

Regards,

David Hooton

Senior Partner

Platform Hosting

1300 85 HOST

www.platformhosting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of Yannick Cayer
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2004 7:03 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: MailScanner -> Spamassassin taking insane amount of bandwidth

Greetings,

I have the following configuration:

mailscanner-4.25-14

with spamassassin 2.61

sendmail 8.11.6-27

on an IBM x235

2 2.4GHZ Processors

1.25 GHZ of RAM

Hot swapable raid 5 config.

We have about a 100 small sites configured for mail mostly and some, web.

This is running on RedHat Linux 7.3 Kernel 2.4.18-27.7.xsmp

We have been running MailScanner on that machine for almost 2 years now
without any problems.

Since we have activated the anti-spam features using SpamAssassin,  and
standard Spam-Checking throught the ORBS lists, our bandwidth usage has more
than doubled.

Before activating that feature, we were using 80-100GB of bandwidth per
month. Now we're up to 224GB for last month.

Has anyone ever heard of SpamAssassin doing this?

Thank you in advance for your help.

  _____

Pain free spam & virus protection -  <http://www.mailsecurity.net.au/> Mail
Security

To report SPAM forward the message to:  <mailto:spam at mailsecurity.net.au>
spam at mailsecurity.net.au
To report incorrectly tagged messages:  <mailto:notspam at mailsecurity.net.au>
notspam at mailsecurity.net.au
 <http://www.platformhosting.com/>
  _____

  _____

Pain free spam & virus protection -  <http://www.mailsecurity.net.au/> Mail
Security

To report SPAM forward the message to:  <mailto:spam at mailsecurity.net.au>
spam at mailsecurity.net.au
To report incorrectly tagged messages:  <mailto:notspam at mailsecurity.net.au>
notspam at mailsecurity.net.au
 <http://www.platformhosting.com/>
  _____

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