subdomain delegation for email routing

Fri Sep 26 15:38:53 PDT 2003

Quoting Heather Stern (star at starshine.org):
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 12:04:32PM -0700, afactor wrote:
> > Please let me clarify:
> > 
> > Management's stated desire is to reduce the load on the corporate email
> > server which is currently straining under the virus/spam/worm
> > load. Management feels strongly that email that is forwarded to the
> > outside customer care vendor should not place a load on the corporate
> > email server. Management also feels that there should not be a delay in
> > the delivery of said email (although arguably that delay may not be
> > significant).
> 
> Then they are about to chop their hand off should the outsourced site
> decide to start flaking entirely on your users rather than merely take
> two days to get to them.  A better solution is to get defenses against
> the wormspam in at the MTA level so that crap is only stressing the

Sigh.  I love solving solutions rather than problems.
"I need large rubber boots for work"
why?
"I keep burning my foot"
how?
"I keep kicking the coffee machine"
stop it
"No, it's under my desk, it's not on purpose"
Take it out from under your desk
"No, we have to keep the coffee machine under the desk"
because
"Because the cord is short and under my desk is on a different
 circuit than the computer, so we don't pop breakers with it there."

Sometimes, you don't need rubber boots, you need an extension cord.

I've had Ultrix boxes - 33Mhz with 5400 RPM drives - handle 100k
messages per day and be really really bored.  We ran 40k through
them in a couple hrs as part of a test and they shot up to a load
of, er, 6.

I work with an E250 that handles 40k message/hour.  (wasn't bored
until we stopped using software mirroring and got a good Baydel
RAID box on it.  Then it got mostly bored.).

I STILL have a Sparc 10 (150Mhz) that anti-spams and filters
for around 50 people - 3000 message/day.  trust me, 64MB and 150MHz
is not a fast machine.  I'll trade you a 36GB drive for one.

So what are your GOALS?
- You want a copy of the mail, it seems, elsewhere.
- You want viruses stopped, somewhere.
- And you get at least 4 messages/day.

I'm betting a PC too slow to run windows could handle this
pretty handily.

If you ARE looking at real volumes (50k or more/hour), then it
can STILL be solved handily at your edge.

Sendmail, Inc has a milter I called the "big brother milter" that
did copy mail.  It can be done via procmail as well (or aliases,
if it's a small enough group of users).

Virus and spam scanning is a well established space with many vendors.

Perhaps you just need an extension cord.