Re: huge email system

From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.com)
Date: 11/22/03

  • Next message: Stephen J. Bevan: "Re: IPSec VPN & NATD (problem with alias_address vs redirect_address)" 
    Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 20:05:17 -0500
To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org

    Bill Campbell, the prominent pundit, on Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 16:42
    while half mumbling, half-witicized:

    > On Fri, Nov 21, 2003, Bill Vermillion wrote:
    > >They all laughed on Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 17:28 when David said:

    > >> Hello -

    > >> We need to build a stable, redundant, and speedy email system
    > >> that will last for a few years. We need to handle about 500,000
    > >> emails per day. We have about 30,000 users, so we need a lot of
    > >> storage.

    > >30,000 users with only 500,000 emails per day. I say that based on
    > >running a small ISP with a few hundred users and see large mail
    > >volume. All are business accounts.

    > >I'll let others comment on the rest, but I think 500,000 emails per
    > >day may be underestimating things. That's only 20 emails per user
    > >per day.

    > I don't think that's far off. We have a customer who's a
    > regional ISP with about 2,000 dialup customers, and they average
    > about 13,000 e-mails in and out in a 24 hour period. That's
    > handled easily on a 550MhZ PIII with 128MB of RAM running
    > Caldera eServer 2.3 Linux, and a load average of about 0.33.
    > They're running postfix and courier-imap for the e-mail. This
    > same system is running a fair number of web sites on apache
    > as well. This machine has been running non-stop since October
    > 2000 (hence the old version of Linux), rebooting only for power
    > failures and equipment moves.

    Interesting. Maybe because we don't have any dialups at all and
    have all business accounts, that's why the mail flow is larger.
    We stopped selling DSL when the ISP we were building for a client
    inside OUR ISP decided it wasn't worth it.

    > Our main mail server here handles far fewer incoming mail
    > messages, but delivers about 35,000 outgoing messages daily
    > for several technical mailing lists, and it's a secondary MX
    > server for most of our customers. It's running on an even older
    > machine, a 350MhZ Pentium II running Caldera OpenLinux 2.3. The
    > machine it replaced handled similar mail loads from 1995 through
    > 2000, running on a Pentium 90 with SCO OpenServer.

    I know the machine since you were doing tertiary MX for this
    account when I only had dial up and the locals were shaky.

    > >As to last a few years - who knows. In the past year I've seen
    > >such an overall increase in mail volume that now I'm looking to get
    > >new servers with more CPU power. It's not disk size that is the
    > >problem but the in-coming and out-going traffic that is killing the
    > >CPU.

    > Running programs like spamassassin will be a major factor.
    > Checking for worms that attack the Microsoft virus, Windows,
    > can be done very efficiently if one looks only for executable
    > attachments. It gets a bit more expensive if one runs wormware
    > such as McAfee's uvscan to pick up things like Word and Excell
    > macro worms.

    Believe it or not we are not running spam filters, but just block
    major spam sending sites. The reason is that with at least two
    clients - and insurance agency and a private investigation agency
    we don't want to be held responsible for rejecting something that
    could be very important. They know this up front and filter at
    their location so they can be SURE nothing important is missed.
    The investigation agency just put in two T1 lines. Once for voice
    and one for their web site where they exchange HUGE graphics.
    But they opted to keep us running their mail for them.

    One very high tech engineering firm split into 3 separate divisions
    with one moving to New Jersey. They still keep mail with us, so we
    are an anomoly - with extremely close customer support. We charge
    more for this but customers are happy.

    Bill 

    -- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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  • Next message: Stephen J. Bevan: "Re: IPSec VPN & NATD (problem with alias_address vs redirect_address)"

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