How do you count e-mail?

[Glenn Steen]

On 19/03/2008, Jason Ede <J.Ede at birchenallhowden.co.uk> wrote:
> ________________________________________
>  From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Alessandro Dentella [sandro at e-den.it]
>  Sent: 18 March 2008 17:43
>  To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
>  Subject: How do you count e-mail?
>
>
>  Hi,
>
>   yesterday some of you helped me out tuning a server. I always considered
>   it a 50-70.000 e-mail/day server (6000 domains), and for this reason, I
>   didn't set up a rbldnsd (they suggest to only set it up when you go over
>   250.00 mail/day.)
>
>   Today I tried pflogsumm and found completely different nubers:
>
>   48052   received
>   36004   delivered
>       0   forwarded
>     939   deferred  (6049  deferrals)
>    1288   bounced
>    1046k  rejected (96%)
>       0   reject warnings
>   96125   held
>       0   discarded (0%)
>
>    That's mode that 1 million messages received in a day and 96% rejected!
>    In the 48.00 received there is a 43% spam recognized and some more 5%
>    that I should menage to cut.
>
>    So some simple questions:
>
>    1. how do you consider the volume of a server: reading the rejected or
>       the received?
>
>    2. which is the average % spam that is 'fisiological' to accept in a fine
>       tuned server?
>
>
>   for the curious ones. Yesterday was a nightmare with up to 12.000 messages in
>   the queue. Today no more than 200. I moved rbl at the postfix level and I
>   reduced to just 3 rbl. I had to raise the postfix process to 500 (350/400
>   used). Previously I tried putting rbl in postfix but since I didn't raise the
>   postfix processes I had too many rejected connections.
>
>
>  sandro
>  *:-)
>
>
> If you have that number of postfix processes you definitely need a local version of rbldnsd running if you want to keep your response times sensible... The spamhaus feed is well worth the money (we use it) and it makes quite a difference in response times for the RBL lookups with it all being local. Also for when you reject emails its a good idea to set the reject wait time to 0 (it defaults to waiting for I think 1 second) before rejecting email. Details on that setting is in one of the postfix tuning links that have been posted previously.
>
~500K of the rejects are from invalid HELO/EHLO... So they don't reach
any rbl checking... But if a sizeable part of the others do... Not
saying "don't do rbldnsd", on the contrary... Just pointing out that
those specific rejects wouldn't "count":-).

>  We find that around 90% of our attempted rejections are because of the spamhaus blacklists (be careful with using the pbl one depending on where the email is coming from) and then about 5%-6% with the other rbl's, receipt verification and greylisting. We only average about 1million attempted connections a month though.
>
>
>  Jason
>

Cheers
-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se