University MailScanner Setup

[Steve Freegard]

On 11/12/09 18:55, shuttlebox wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Gottschalk, David<dgottsc at emory.edu>  wrote:
>> Then we would just have a bunch of MailScanner machines fronted by a load balancer to handle all inbound email (I'd imagine we need more than six after doing so)
>
> I doubt you need to spend money/time on a dedicated load balancer.
> Just setting up all your MailScanner servers as MX hosts in your DNS
> should do the trick for free. Load balancing via round robin from DNS
> and failover from SMTP automatically picking the next MX if one is not
> available.
>

If you can afford a proper load balancer with all the associated bells 
and whistles, then IMO you'll save yourself plenty of headaches in a 
MailScanner environment.

MX load balancing is fine for SMTP services; but MailScanner doesn't 
speak SMTP - it's both post-queue and batching, so if you can report 
your inbound queue sizes to the load balancer; then you can minimize 
your pre-delivery waiting times and ensure that load is evenly spread 
out - which can be a real problem if you have mismatched machines 
performance wise.

Kind regards,
Steve.