ANNOUNCE: BarricadeMX is released

Tue May 29 21:07:25 IST 2007

The BarricadeMX demo link on fsl.com still presents info about the 
DefenderMX trial.

http://www.fsl.com/register-new2.php

Regards
Michael Baird

> 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 <http://www.fsl.com> or www.snertsoft.com 
> <http://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 <mailto: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 <mailto:Steve at fsl.com>
> www.fsl.com <http://www.fsl.com>
>  
> 
> -- 
> This message has been scanned for viruses and
> dangerous content by *MailScanner* <http://www.mailscanner.info/>, and is
> believed to be clean.
> For all you IT requirements visit transtec Computers 
> <http://www.transtec.co.uk/>.
> 