[CentOS] Re: How to size an email server to handle 5 million emails per day

[Joshua Gimer]

I can only talk from experience; we are currently doing spam and anti- 
virus checks in our inbound flow of around 600,000 messages per day.  
To do this we have three inbound SMTP gateways running Sophos  
Puremessage with Sendmail as the MTA.. These systems are quad proc  
systems with 6 to 8 GB of ram. This is still not enough to handle the  
inbound flow efficiently at our organization.

We are currently looking into Ironport, which should be able to handle  
our entire inbound and outbound flow on one system. They say that they  
have the ability to drop around 98% of traffic that is coming in using  
reputation filtering, anti-spam checks and anti-virus checks. We have  
been demoing the device for a couple of months and I am really happy  
with it, it has been doing what was promised.

Josh G.

On Jan 3, 2008, at 9:21 AM, Ugo Bellavance wrote:

> Erick Perez wrote:
>> I have no idea as to how to size an email server. I was approached by
>> a customer that wanted a single server with RAID 1 disks to handle
>> about 5 million emails a day.
>> In general terms, what parameters should I take into account to size
>> the hardware specs when the average email is about 10kb, the smalles
>> email is 2kb and the largest email is about 5meg (with attachment)
>> thanks,
>
> I don't know if you have done it yet, but Fort System's new  
> offering, BarricadeMX, could help you cut spam.
>
> http://www.fsl.com/barricademx.html
>
> It is closed-source, but FSL gives a lot to open-source communities,  
> especially MailScanner's.
>
> Ugo
>
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