On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 23:17, Michael Menefee wrote:
> Just wondering if anyone else is seeing what I've been seeing for the past
> few months. I have several customers running SA 2.63 on qmail.....for each
> of them I have setup an individual qmail server that scans their inbound
> email for spam and viruses. This box is setup in their MX records with a
> priority of 10. I have a fallback box that all of my customers utilize with
> an MX priority of 100. 
> 
> I have been closely monitoring the Spam statistics using sa-stats.pl...what
> I'm seeing is that the dedicated boxes setup as the "primary" MX record is
> catching on average about 80% of all inbound emails. The "secondary" box
> (that is--the shared box with a priority of 100) is catching about 99.8% (if
> not 100%) on a daily basis. These are valid spams begin caught as well.
> 
> This just seems odd to me that the secondary MX record would receive a much
> higher volume of spam and wondered of anyone else was seeing this and if
> there was an explanation. BTW, for the 3 or so customers I'm referring to, I
> process about 300,000 messages per day. The fallback box processes about
> 70,000 per day, with about 68,000 or more being caught as SPAM
> 
As others have pointed out, spammers are hoping your anti-spam defenses
are weaker or non-existent on your secondaries.

For this reason, I've got a cronjob on my secondaries that checks to see
that at least one of my primaries is up - if the primaries are
responding, it drops a .cf file in the SA directory that adds a few
points to every e-mail (since they're almost certainly spam).  If the
primaries are down, that .cf file is removed (and spamd is restarted, as
needed).

The theory is that I don't want to block stuff outright, as there will
be a short delay before my secondaries notices that the primaries are
down (or network problems could mean other senders can't see my
primaries, even though my secondaries can).


> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Mike
>  
> 
> ---
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>  
> 

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