As promised here is an update to our Anti-Spam gateway since we have gone live. We have successfully been running for over a week now and are receiving positive comments regarding the service.

To monitor the performance of the server and to allow for some pretty spiffy looking reports we are making use of MailWatch. MailWatch will also form the base of our end user interface which is currently a work in progress.

One important change we have made to the MailScanner configuration is switching to using a ClamAV Perl module to scan email. When utilising the executable ClamAV we found the servers load average to be constantly sitting around 25 and mail delays upto an hour and a half. You can change this within /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf as follows;

• Virus Scanners = clamavmodule

You will need to restart MailScanner for this change to kick in. Providing you used the SA / ClamAV RPM I linked to in the initial article to install ClamAV, this Perl module will already be available to you.

We are now running this solution on a Dell PowerEdge SC1435 AMD Opteron, 2GB Ram and 160GB SATAII Hard Drives in a RAID0 configuration. I believe the hard disks were the primary bottleneck on our initial server and as such the decision was made to run in RAID0. The server stores no customer data so data redundancy is not an issue.

The servers load average now sits around 1.5. On average over the last few days we are processing 100000 emails a day, 47% of being tagged as spam, and another 2% being tagged as virus.