University MailScanner Setup

[Gottschalk, David]

Thanks to everyone for the tips/advice.

I think Derek has the most relevant case to our setup.

I suspect that rejecting spam on the SMTP/MTA level will be the best approach to prevent us from having to use lots of gateway machines. Currently, we utilize six, but not as efficiently as I would like to.

If anyone else has any setups similar to ours that they would like to mention, I would appreciate it.

David Gottschalk
UTS Email team
david.gottschalk at emory.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Derek Chee
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 4:20 PM
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: Re: University MailScanner Setup

On Dec 11, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Gottschalk, David wrote:
> I'm wondering though how other colleges are handling their mail filtering using MailScanner. How many machines are being used, etc, etc?

At UC Irvine, we have four Sendmail+MailScanner external email gateways.  We don't have a load balancer, just MX records.  The four servers are not identical so we occasionally have unbalanced load issues, but nothing of major concern.  We run ClamAV as a milter with most of the SaneSecurity signatures, Spamhaus ZEN RBL for blocking, internal block list, greylisting, connection throttling (too many, too soon, too many bad, etc.) and SpamAssassin (just tagging, no quarantine).

According to the the latest stats, we blocked 6.7 million connections/messages last week through whatever means.  Accepted 2.3 million messages and marked 136k of those as spam.  These numbers are not peak numbers.  We had a dramatic drop off in spam in September 2008.  Before that time, we were rejecting around 4 million connections/messages per day with the same set of four servers, while the number of accepted messages stayed the same.  I really couldn't tell you how many mailboxes we protect as the gateways protect multiple servers at UC Irvine and I've never counted all of the potential accounts.

-- Derek

Derek Chee
Network & Support Programming
Office of Information Technology
University of California, Irvine




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