Re: BMITU

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 22:11:41 PDT, Jim Shankland said:

> Hans Reiser would argue that that reflects a limitation of the
> filesystem, rather than of qmail; and that apps should not
> have to code around such unreasonable filesystem limitations.
> And reiserfs goes to considerable effort to achieve good
> performance on directories containing thousands of small
> files.
> 
> This would imply that if you're going to use qmail in a high-volume
> environment, you might consider using reiserfs, also.

I'd recommend also  tracking/testing reiser4 in your testbed - the early
benchmarks on it are quite astounding



pgp0.pgp
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Re: BMITU

[Jim Shankland]

> Qmail doesn't scale well with large injection rates.  Qmail
> scaling in that sort of manner is completely dependant upon
> the filesystem.  Now this may have changed, but not that long
> back everything in submission was in one dir, processing in
> another dir, just like sendmail (by default) does.  This
> caused the queue manager to stuff up something wicked at high
> injection rates.

Hans Reiser would argue that that reflects a limitation of the
filesystem, rather than of qmail; and that apps should not
have to code around such unreasonable filesystem limitations.
And reiserfs goes to considerable effort to achieve good
performance on directories containing thousands of small
files.

This would imply that if you're going to use qmail in a high-volume
environment, you might consider using reiserfs, also.

Jim Shankland

RE: BMITU

[Michael Loftis]

Qmail doesn't scale well with large injection rates.  Qmail scaling in that 
sort of manner is completely dependant upon the filesystem.  Now this may 
have changed, but not that long back everything in submission was in one 
dir, processing in another dir, just like sendmail (by default) does.  This 
caused the queue manager to stuff up something wicked at high injection 
rates.

--On Friday, September 05, 2003 2:23 PM -0400 Robert Bridgham 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I have been a UNIX geek for quite a few years and in that time I have had
the pleasure or displeasure of working with many mail packages.  The 2
that I had the most exposure to was Sendmail and Qmail.  Now barring any
flames about sendmail, once I had exposure to Qmail I will never turned
back. Qmail was developed with security in mind, it has never had a
security bug in the years it has been available, it is scalable, reliable
and easy to administrate.  Now I will not bore you with every spec or
detail about how it runs but even Hotmail.com uses Qmail as it's MTA.
This the one of the leading webmail sites in the world with between
80-100million accounts, and still running strong.  I would definitely put
my vote to Qmail for any organization, any size!
- Robert Bridgham

-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of
Fisher, Shawn
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 11:03 AM
To: Nanog List (E-mail)
Subject: BMITU


This is my first post so please be gentle.

I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in
the Universe.
Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
I have looked at Communigate Pro, IMAIL, and others.

I am interested in integrated solution that can scale to handle 500k
accounts
Any experience good / bad would be great.

Thanks

/SF





--
Undocumented Features quote of the moment...
"It's not the one bullet with your name on it that you
have to worry about; it's the twenty thousand-odd rounds
labeled `occupant.'"
  --Murphy's Laws of Combat

RE: BMITU

[McBurnett, Jim]

> Robert Bridgham wrote:
> 
> > it runs but even Hotmail.com uses Qmail as it's MTA.  This 
> the one of the
> > leading webmail sites in the world with between 
> 80-100million accounts, and
> > still running strong.  I would definitely put my vote to 
> Qmail for any
> > organization, any size!
> > 
> telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
> Trying 65.54.252.99...
> Connected to mx1.hotmail.com.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 220 mc5-f7 Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 
> 5.0.2195.5600 ready at 
>   Sat, 6
>   Sep 2003 13:51:52 -0700
> quit
> 221 mc5-f7 Service closing transmission channel
> Connection closed by foreign host.
> 
> I wouldn't recommend it myself, but well... ummm, yeah.
> 
> -Jack

I can't remember the whole story, but when Microsoft
bought hotmail they converted it to exchange server.
if was using qmail.. and that was very stable...

Later,
J

Re: BMITU

[Jack Bates]

Robert Bridgham wrote:

it runs but even Hotmail.com uses Qmail as it's MTA.  This the one of the
leading webmail sites in the world with between 80-100million accounts, and
still running strong.  I would definitely put my vote to Qmail for any
organization, any size!
telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
Trying 65.54.252.99...
Connected to mx1.hotmail.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mc5-f7 Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.5600 ready at 
 Sat, 6
 Sep 2003 13:51:52 -0700
quit
221 mc5-f7 Service closing transmission channel
Connection closed by foreign host.

I wouldn't recommend it myself, but well... ummm, yeah.

-Jack

RE: BMITU

[Robert Bridgham]

I have been a UNIX geek for quite a few years and in that time I have had
the pleasure or displeasure of working with many mail packages.  The 2 that
I had the most exposure to was Sendmail and Qmail.  Now barring any flames
about sendmail, once I had exposure to Qmail I will never turned back.
Qmail was developed with security in mind, it has never had a security bug
in the years it has been available, it is scalable, reliable and easy to
administrate.  Now I will not bore you with every spec or detail about how
it runs but even Hotmail.com uses Qmail as it's MTA.  This the one of the
leading webmail sites in the world with between 80-100million accounts, and
still running strong.  I would definitely put my vote to Qmail for any
organization, any size!

- Robert Bridgham

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of
> Fisher, Shawn
> Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 11:03 AM
> To: Nanog List (E-mail)
> Subject: BMITU
>
>
>
> This is my first post so please be gentle.
>
> I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in
> the Universe.
> Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
>
> I have looked at Communigate Pro, IMAIL, and others.
>
> I am interested in integrated solution that can scale to handle 500k
> accounts
>
> Any experience good / bad would be great.
>
> Thanks
>
> /SF
>
>

Re: BMITU

[Robert Boyle]

At 05:54 PM 9/4/2003, you wrote:
Communigate Pro is not a Windows mail server... It runs on nearly
everything; and can handle millions of accounts (it has extensive
clustering support).  Check their website: www.stalker.com for specs.
I stand corrected. I was only familiar with the Windows version. Thanks for 
the heads up. Apologies to all.

-Robert

Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
"Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - 
Francis Jeffrey

Re: BMITU

[Vadim Antonov]

Communigate Pro is not a Windows mail server... It runs on nearly
everything; and can handle millions of accounts (it has extensive
clustering support).  Check their website: www.stalker.com for specs.

--vadim

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Robert Boyle wrote:

> 
> At 11:02 AM 9/4/2003, you wrote:
> >This is my first post so please be gentle.
> >
> >I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in the Universe.
> >Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
> >
> >I have looked at Communigate Pro, IMAIL, and others.
> >
> >I am interested in integrated solution that can scale to handle 500k
> >accounts
> >
> >Any experience good / bad would be great.
> 
> None of the Windows mail servers listed above or the others such as 
> Mailsite, MDaemon, Merak, etc. are capable of more than 10-20k active 
> users. Forget about 500k with any you have listed. If you want a solid mail 
> server which WILL handle 500k users and will run on Windows and most *nix 
> platforms, look at Surgemail from http://www.netwinsite.com It is 
> incredibly scalable and VERY fast. It uses a spam assassin-like filter 
> which is written in C so it is at least 20-100 times faster than spam 
> assassin and 95% as effective. It includes support for AVAST anti-virus and 
> the webmail program is powerful, fast, and includes support for PGP. It is 
> an AWESOME product and the support and developers are top notch too. I 
> don't have any vested interest in the company, but I am a very happy 
> customer. (They also make DNews which many people here are probably 
> familiar with)
> 
> -Robert
> 
> 
> Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
> http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
> "Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - 
> Francis Jeffrey
> 

Re: BMITU

[Robert Boyle]

At 02:35 PM 9/4/2003, Brad Knowles wrote:
 and most *nix platforms, look at Surgemail from http://www.netwinsite.com
 It is incredibly scalable and VERY fast.
Got any benchmarks?
We have tested all of them. We process several million messages per day for 
tellurian.com. The only server which doesn't die immediately or within 
30-60 minutes is Surgemail. All others are crippled by multi-threaded and 
multi-homed dictionary attacks very quickly. I am speaking only of Win32 
servers. That is what he asked for.

   It uses a spam assassin-like
 filter which is written in C so it is at least 20-100 times faster than
 spam assassin and 95% as effective.
Again, benchmarks, please.
Spam assassin could not handle the load and choked on the mail volume. We 
were only able to process 1-2 messages per second with spam assassin. (not 
running spamc/spamd since it doesn't work on Win32) We can now peak at 
50-100 messages per second without any problem. The ruleset is completely 
customizable and it includes a distributed razor-like checksuming spamtrap 
database. Even without Bayes capability, with thousands of messages per 
day, I only receive one or two false positves or false negatives per week.

In particular, I'd also like to see effectiveness benchmarks, 
such as the ones recently reported at 
.  Here, SpamAssassin won as a 
non-learning filter, but it also has a Bayesian/learning mode that would 
allow it to perform as well as or better than any of the other learning 
types.  Of course, they tested version 2.55 and 2.60 is already 
available, so that would also make a difference.
Unfortunately, spam assassin is so effective and popular that spammers are 
using the rules to game SA now. We use a different ruleset than SA so we 
are less susceptible to forced false negatives.

  It includes support for AVAST
 anti-virus
Any other anti-virus solutions supported?  AMaViS and amavisd-new 
support something like thirty different plug-in modules that you can use.
Sure. You can use any command line scanner. Norton, McAfee, RAV, 
whatever... We were using RAV until a week ago when we decided to switch to 
AVAST.

 and the webmail program is powerful, fast, and includes
 support for PGP.
Webmail is another aspect of the overall system.  Myself, I've 
found that many webmail systems are too dependant on support for 
javascript in the browser.  In particular, IMP/horde has a problem in 
this area.  We found that TWIG was the best webmail application we could 
find, although I've also heard good things about SquirrelMail. There are 
many others also listed at 
.
It is a standard IMAP/POP/SMTP server so you can use any webmail you want. 
The one which is included is very fast and powerful. It includes almost any 
feature a full featured email client should have. View source, view 
headers, PGP, redirect, rules, anti-spam rules and exceptions.

   It is an AWESOME product and the support and
 developers are top notch too. I don't have any vested interest in
 the company, but I am a very happy customer. (They also make DNews
 which many people here are probably familiar with)
DNews I am familiar with.  Not bad for what it is, but Diablo is 
much more scalable.  It's also more difficult to manage, but the best-run 
large news providers in the world that I know of are all using Diablo.
Many also use Cyclone and Typhoon too. I didn't say that DNews was the most 
scalable server, but that people would know the company by it. :) I haven't 
wasted my time or bandwidth running a news server for many years so I can't 
comment on news server scalability.

-Robert

Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
"Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - 
Francis Jeffrey

Re: BMITU

[Ray Wong]

> >that nothing can equal, much less beat, sendmail.  This is especially 
> >true when you start talking about filtering for spam or viruses via 
> >the milter interface.

Well, considering that milter is sendmail's, yes, wanting to use the
milter method gives sendmail an advantage.  There are plenty of other
options if you choose the filter method suited to each mail server.


> What are people using for network based anti-virus?  A friend of mine
> started a company www.raeinterent.com/rav and claims to have an industrial

broken link btw.  probably meant raeinternet.com?   They no longer claim
anything except to have been acquired by M$.

> anti-virus app that plugs into Communigate Pro.  Any experience with network
> based anti-virus & mail systems?

I sure wouldn't call an antivirus scanner that runs on the most common
target platform an ideal solution.

In terms of high-performance anti-virus, go to Trend Micro.  While they
have their problems, the vscan interface is the quickest and most scalable
scanner I've found.  500k users is one thing.  Being able to handle the
unpredictable traffic (mail volume over time) for those users is another.
Being able to open each message, recursively open up containering file
formats (zip, tar, rar, et al) and scan the actual file for viruses is
still another.  I don't particularly care for their sendmail replacement
solution, but vscan is a solid component solution.  Admittedly, my own
experience is limited to about 1 million messags/hr, so depending on your
actual mail traffic, it may not hold up as well.

Ignore the data you have on sending mail, or at least put it in its place.
It's much easier to keep up your own outbound traffic rate than it is to
deal with the same quantity of inbound traffic (sendmail can easily flood
an identical sendmail configuration, or at least render it unable to talk
to anyone else due to being busy -- yes, you can rate limit senders, but
that is not scaling your own ability to accept traffic now, is it?).

While none of the unix options are stellar at it, windows options tend to
be even more inefficient at I/O operations, rather critical when you're
dealing with a lot of small files, such as in a mail server.  Unix
options generally have an easier time dividing traffic across spindles
as well, which is one way to buy yourself more throughput.

I've had very encouraging results with Postfix over the years, and it fails
the most gracefully and consistently of any common server I've tried.  This
is quite valuable in designing a reliable and scalable solution, imho.
It's fairly easy to plug in modifications as needed, and extremely easy
to handle routine configuration changes.  Parallelized management works
as well as nearly anything.  Qmail can be bent to do many things, but
was intended to be small, so adding features gets increasingly painful
with each addition.

If you have made the religious decision that only Windows based servers
can do the job for you, your only hope would be Domino.  Call IBM, then
setup a postfix relay box in front of it to fix the (outbound) headers. :-\
Every other windows-based mail server I've seen fails (often dramatically)
at 20k or so users, or smaller.  Domino fails too, but at least tends to
parallelize well.  It also has a path upwards in the event you choose
your underlying platform poorly.

Whatever it is, you're in for some, umm, interesting times.  I still remember
my own experiences quite vividly. :)  

-- 

Ray Wong
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

RE: BMITU

[Austad, Jay]

I second the vote for Postfix.  I haven't used it with a ton of users, but I
built a large mail cluster for my old employer which was used to send stock
pricing alerts to users that have set up thresholds for certain stocks.

Initially, the cluster was qmail (that was back in 2000).  I used qmail
because it's performance was better than anything else I tested, including
postfix.  Qmail is a pain to administer, especially when you have a bunch of
them.  After getting fed up with qmail, I tested Postfix again, and the
newer versions of it outperformed qmail by a longshot, and I could spawn
many more connections with it without running out of file descriptors.
Adding features to qmail sucks because it's always a patch, and it's usually
something that most other mailservers already have built in.  When you
install it and have 10 patches that you need to apply, you need to apply
them in the right order so they don't step on each other.  There are some
limits in qmail that you need to patch for in order to make it work in a
very large environment, like the big-concurrency patch and the patch to
increase the size of the queue.

Administration of postfix can all be done with the postconf command, you
don't have to edit config files at all.  This makes it great for clusters
because I had a script I wrote that would execute a command across all of
the machines in the cluster.  So a config change for every machine involved
typing:
grun 'postconf -e whatever = something'
grun 'postfix reload'

I've heard some good things about exim, but in my testing, I was unable to
get the performance I could get with postfix.  Maybe it was my fault, I
didn't spend that much time with Exim because the ease of administration
with Postfix was vastly better than any other mailserver I've used.

Postfix rocks.  Apple just ripped sendmail out of OS X and replaced it with
Postfix if that says anything.  

-jay

> -Original Message-
> From: Jack Bates [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 10:32 AM
> To: Fisher, Shawn
> Cc: Nanog List (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: BMITU
> 
> 
> 
> Fisher, Shawn wrote:
> 
> > I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in 
> the Universe.
> > Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
> 
> I'm partial to sendmail due to the grandfather clause, but if 
> I could go 
> back in time and redesign everything, I'd be a diehard postfix fan. I 
> have seen postfix and sendmail used in mail servers handling over 30 
> Million accounts. Good enough for ya?
> 
> -Jack
> 
> 

Re: BMITU

[Robert Boyle]

At 11:02 AM 9/4/2003, you wrote:
This is my first post so please be gentle.

I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in the Universe.
Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
I have looked at Communigate Pro, IMAIL, and others.

I am interested in integrated solution that can scale to handle 500k
accounts
Any experience good / bad would be great.
None of the Windows mail servers listed above or the others such as 
Mailsite, MDaemon, Merak, etc. are capable of more than 10-20k active 
users. Forget about 500k with any you have listed. If you want a solid mail 
server which WILL handle 500k users and will run on Windows and most *nix 
platforms, look at Surgemail from http://www.netwinsite.com It is 
incredibly scalable and VERY fast. It uses a spam assassin-like filter 
which is written in C so it is at least 20-100 times faster than spam 
assassin and 95% as effective. It includes support for AVAST anti-virus and 
the webmail program is powerful, fast, and includes support for PGP. It is 
an AWESOME product and the support and developers are top notch too. I 
don't have any vested interest in the company, but I am a very happy 
customer. (They also make DNews which many people here are probably 
familiar with)

-Robert

Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
"Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - 
Francis Jeffrey

RE: BMITU

[Fisher, Shawn]

>that nothing can equal, much less beat, sendmail.  This is especially 
>true when you start talking about filtering for spam or viruses via 
>the milter interface.

What are people using for network based anti-virus?  A friend of mine
started a company www.raeinterent.com/rav and claims to have an industrial
anti-virus app that plugs into Communigate Pro.  Any experience with network
based anti-virus & mail systems?

Thx

Re: BMITU

[Joel Rowbottom]

At 11:02 04/09/2003 -0400, Fisher, Shawn wrote:

I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in the Universe.
Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
 have looked at Communigate Pro, IMAIL, and others.
I am interested in integrated solution that can scale to handle 500k
accounts
I'm a die-hard exim fan (www.exim.org) which is used by quite a few ISPs 
here in the UK for volume VISPs (Freeserve, Demon and Mailbox spring to mind).

I'm even more of a die-hard fan since I discovered it did localscan plugins.

--
Joel Rowbottom - vaguely human, mostly harmless, still alive.
Self-confessed was-kid, Unix geek & Net addict since 1991
Personal: http://www.joel.co.uk | Pics: http://photos.jml.net

RE: BMITU

[Fisher, Shawn]

>You didn't specify operating system but for 500,000 users I wouldn't 
>even go near Windows.  

thanks for the feedback..we are a SUN shop so solarius is our OS of choice.

>I use a healthy mix of Postfix as the mail server 
>and Courier-IMAP for POP3/IMAP delivery.  They both work extremely well.

Chris

-- 
Chris Horry   "Don't submit to stupid rules,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Be yourself and not a fool.
PGP: DSA/2B4C654E  Don't accept average habits,
Amateur Radio: KG4TSM   Open your heart and push the limits."

Re: BMITU

[Jack Bates]

Fisher, Shawn wrote:

I would like to get some opinions on the Best Mailserver in the Universe.
Is there a more appropriate list for this question?
I'm partial to sendmail due to the grandfather clause, but if I could go 
back in time and redesign everything, I'd be a diehard postfix fan. I 
have seen postfix and sendmail used in mail servers handling over 30 
Million accounts. Good enough for ya?

-Jack