[TriLUG] sendmail vs. postfix - was Re: stupid sendmail question?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Ben Pitzer wrote:

>I'd like to hear of Postfix implementation and trials in situations similar
>to my experience (broadband ISP, X number of mail accounts, Y number of
>messages per day on average, and mail filtering, be it for spam or AV), but
>that's going to be tough to come by, I know.
>

I might can provide numbers of that nature.  I'll have a look at pushing 
the last two weeks logs through pflogsum sometime tomorrow to work up 
the numbers.  Just a an off-the-cuff metric, I'd guess we average 
something like 9-10 messages a second over a 24hr average, and I know 
it's not uncommon for us (during dictionary-based spam attacks) to have 
200 open inbound connections on each mail server.  That's with Postfix 
and Amavisd-new running SA and ClamAV.  I'm going to be doing some 
testing with the new "before-queue content filter" 
(smtpd_proxy_filter).  I really don't think we can use it in full 
production, because during mail spikes we'd either a) not be able to 
process connections fast enough or b) run out of memory trying.  But it 
certainly warrants more testing before we throw out the idea all together.

Just as a reference / reminder, these boxes don't do anything but suck 
in mail, virus/spam scan it, and pass it along.  No imap, pop3, webmail, 
or even local storage (although local storage might arguably be 
easier).  Both severs are sub-$1,000 machines.  Just a P4 on a nice 
Intel server board with a pair of ide discs in a raid-0 array, and a 
pair of nics.  Also, not that it's terribly relevant, but they're 
running FreeBSD 4.9, not Linux.

Aaron S. Joyner