BarricadeMX experiences

[Steve Freegard]

Res wrote:
>> Two things:
>>
>> 1. As Steve pointed out they have yet to find/hit the limit. They had
>> well over 2000 concurrent connections. And the claim is 1018 concurrent
>> connections per CPU.
> 
> Correct, figures I used are from his website.
> 

Yes - as mentioned by Steve earlier earlier - we have yet to find the 
limit on the number of concurrent connections that it will handle.  I've 
hit other limits in the Linux TCP stack first (which required a bit of 
kernel tuning via /proc).

We believe in truth in our Marketing materials, so we picked a value 
that we knew we could achieve that we had seen on a live system.  I 
don't personally believe in publishing pie-in-the-sky figures based on 
testing in a 'lab' as there is no way to accurately emulate a live SMTP 
stream from thousands of clients with varing latency and behaviour.

> 4 RBL's, a couple of sendmail extra checks like badmx, bad helo and of
> course no dns checks, greet pause, spf milter and another milter which
> does a few very nice tricks, not much spam gets in in the first place,
> and MailScanner seems to get 99% of what does. (I say 99% because to
> think any setup anywhere gets 100% is being just plain nieve)

Now - who is quoting figures without basis.  Have *you* done two 
separate tests on the same million or so mails and published the results 
like you asked of the original poster?

The reason we decided to go the SMTP proxy route with BarricadeMX 
instead of a 'super' milter (e.g. like MIMEdefang) was because the 
milter API is too much of a limiting factor as there are things that you 
simply cannot do with it.

 > as an example, on only one sendmail box for yesterday (courtesy of
 > logwatch)...
 >  MailScanner Status:
 >         2904073 messages Scanned by MailScanner
 >         314 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
 >         27 Content Problems found by MailScanner
 >
 > Most acceptable values I think.
 >

Yes - those figures are OK.  It depends on a lot of factors though 
doesn't it.

Kind regards,
Steve.