Hello List! First off I want to introduce myself. I work as a system admin at a large virtual ISP provider. We are currently looking at replacing our in house spam filtering system (a collection of commercial and free blacklists, whitelists, SPF record checks, reverse DNS entries check, etc) with a proper spam solution. We have evaluated commercial spam filtering appliances such as Iron Port spam gateways but have found that initial purchase costs and yearly maintenance costs are astronomical for a deployment of our scale. As always I would like to turn to the open source community in hopes of finding an effective solution. We already use many open source projects on our systems, such as Apache, MySQL and Linux, so I hope that my proposal to use open source for spam filtering will be successful. I have previously experimented with spam assassin but found that the system requirements do not scale well for larger deployments. I learned about DSPAM from a friend who is running it as a spam filter on his home machine.
I would like to setup DSPAM as a mail relay solution due to the fact that our actual MTA is closely tied to our provisioning system and can not be easily adapted to work with another delivery agent. I would basically like to re-implement the Iron Port systems that we demoed using DSPAM. That is, point the MX records at the DSPAM boxes, have them filter the SPAM and then relay the (HAM) email to our real MTA. I would like to build a test case, 1 box filtering spam for one of our smaller client domains for testing, training and demonstration to my manager and if all goes well we could very well scale up to 500,000+ users right away. What I need to know beforehand is what sort of system requirements I should expect for large deployments such as this. I see from the DSPAM home page that someone has done a 300,000 user install before, does any one know roughly how many boxes they use? How would the spam database be distributed over multiple spam relays? I assume that for a large deployment we would setup one machine to handle the DSPAM database and 2 or 3 or 4 machines to handle the load of processing mail. I have the option of purchasing hardware to build out this spam processing system so if there is anything in particular I should be aware of such as fast SCSI disks, lots of RAM, etc. please let me know. I realize that there is no simple answer to my questions but a response such as "4 dual CPU Xeons with a gig of RAM each should do it" would be a great help at this stage in my research. Thank you in advance, Brandon Macmillan IT Systems Administrator IP Applications Office: (604) 630-5675 Cell: (604) 834-2912 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web: www.ipapplications.com <http://www.ipapplications.com/> This electronic mail transmission contains confidential information intended only for the named person(s). Any use, distribution, copying or disclosure by any other person is strictly prohibited. If you receive this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately so that we may correct our internal records. Please then delete the original message. Thank you.
