Your recommendation please: big volume mail solution

[Arthur Sherman]

> > A client asked me to build for him a mail solution, capable 
> of sending 
> > up to
> > 1 milllion emails a day, while each email doesn't exceed 
> 50KB in size.
> > 
> > How do I calculate:
> > 1) how many servers
> > 2) how do I calculate the above
> > 3) is there any max emails a day from IP/domain, which 
> triggers black 
> > and blocklists
> > 4) what is your recommended software solution
> > 
> > On this stage, most distribution would be in single country.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance
> > 
> > Arthur
> > 
> > 
>  From the MAQ;
> 
> *****************
> Volume: 1,750,000 messages/day (in the lab)
> 
> Average Load: Average of 12
> 
> Hardware: Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 4x 18 GB RAID-1 (using 
> an HP DL380 G3)
> 
> Software: Tao Linux 1.0, Postfix 2.0.18, SpamAssassin 3.02, Razor, DCC
> 
> RBLs: XBL + SBL in MailScanner
> 
> Virus Scanners: ClamAV, Sophos, BitDefender
> 
> Notes: This performance was achieved in the lab, using random 
> message sizes between 1 and 100 Kb. Please see the List 
> archives for 'System capacity'.
> 
> *****************
> Volume : 770,000 messages per day
> 
> Hardware: Dual Opteron, 4Gb RAM, SCSI disk
> 
> Software: RedHat Enterprise Linux 4
> 
> Configuration: MailScanner 4.50 default setup with 
> clamavmodule virus scanner, SpamAssassin, Razor, DCC, Sendmail
> 
> ******************
> 
> Since you believe this isn't a spammer, you don't need any of 
> the process hogs like antivirus or spamassassin, or even need 
> mailscanner because the sender already knows what his content 
> is  ;-)  and should be able to achieve the goal with one of 
> these. With quad core Xeons very common right now, it should 
> be fairly easy if it has a big enough pipe to the internet, 
> and you tune things like timeouts and retries to run later or 
> not at all.
> Being an opt-out list, you could probably just dump the 
> retries, and just shotgun the messages out to where they fall.
> 
> I see just another direct marketer trying to compete for MY bandwidth.
> Someday, people will be smart enough to not buy things 
> marketed this way ... 
> never mind, won't happen. Look at the people that still fall 
> for 419 scams.

Thank you, Scott, nice writeup!

Even if it is a spam, it is also a good mental exercise, as someone told me
in private.

Arthur