--On April 18, 2006 7:08:05 PM -0400 Valdis Kletnieks 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 18:54:38 EDT, Bill Verity said:
>
>> However, I think the system is running fine.  We processed 67,000
>> files yesterday which is a lot but not a record.  As far as I can
>> tell, more than 3/4 of that load was garbage.
>
> Can you give a better description of what you were seeing than "3/4 was
> garbage"?
>
> Do you have any idea where the bottleneck was, exactly?  Between the
> sending box and your Listserv's MTA?  Sitting in the Listserv queue?
> Listserv waiting to hand off the mail to the outbound MTA
> (SMTP_FORWARD_1="3*localhost" was a big win for us there, as was
> 'FEATURE(nocanonify)' in sendmail.mc).
>
>> If we decide to run spamassasin, that will just require more hardware
>> without stemming the flow of incoming junk.
>
> If you're running spamassassin, and it's not stemming the flow of junk,
> why would you be running it?  Presumably you'd *do* something with the
> junk.

SpamAssassin doesn't though stop anything.  It just filters.  And stopping 
it is not the same as filtering it.  Running SA is far more expensive CPU 
wise and if you're doing network checks, network wise as well than ListServ.


I'd recommend to the original sender that if they're on Unix to take the 
advice given above and use 3* as well as nocanonify (if you can) and 
irregardless of unix or windows, employ a blacklist such as spamcop at your 
front door.