--On April 18, 2006 7:28:51 PM -0400 Valdis Kletnieks 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Yes, SA only filters and tells you something about the mail (primarily, a
> score that indicates how spammy it thinks the mail is).
>
> My point was that if you're going to all the effort of feeding the junk
> through SA, you should be then *using* the returned score to route junk
> into a quarantine or something.  Feeding it through SA and then not
> *doing* something with the returned information is just silicon-based
> navel-gazing....
>
> If nothing is *using* that SA-assigned score, save a *lot* of resources
> and turn SA off....
>


My point was that even without SA, if the machine can't keep up, it 
probably won't keep up with SA.  In fact, SA would make your queues quite a 
bit deeper since it would have demands on the CPU and I/O resources 
ListServ wants to use so it would quite likely make it worse.  Increase 
efficiency, decrease workload, or increase hardware speed, those are how 
you get out of issues like this.  SA significantly increases workload and 
decreases the efficiency.  The only time SA is a win is if it stops a spam 
from going to a fairly large distribution list.


So what I was getting at is that if he increases efficiency, by applying 
tuning, and decreases the workload, by applying up front, light weight 
filtering that prevents mail from going into the queues in the first place 
(SMTP and Job queues here) then things will should improve.


Something like 50% of all mail we get attempted at my day job (Modwest) is 
SPAM.  Actually it's more, but 50% for sure.  By judiciously deploying 
public black lists as well as maintaining our own we have greatly reduced 
the amount of mail we have to actually handle and process.



--
"Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors
into trouble of all kinds."
-- Samuel Butler