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We are evaluating smartermail and are wondering what kind of volume it can handle.  I know it's machine specific but we send/recieve close to 5 million messages per day for 7200 users and it's tough to establish what it can do with the 10 user free version.  We would be running it with declude and not SpamAssasin.

Thanks

there's no way it'd handle that volume if you have antivirus and spam assassin running on the same box, ours is doing about 100,000 a day and it's working fine with antivirus offloaded to another machine.

Yeah, I've already noticed that ClamAV and SA are pretty tough on processor utilization, that's why we'de be using Declude (with the hope that it's less intense)... I just like the webmail interface of this product so much, none of the larger products can touch it.

We have 4700 users across 300 domains, in which we delegate Declude and Message.Sniffer onto two servers running SM 4.1 and SM 2. Works great as a mail server, but we've been having lockup issues with SM 4 and Declude.

I would call ST and discuss it with their Sales department.  They will be able to give you a better idea on the type of setup you will need.  The biggest limitation in SM is disk I/O.  SM is also very flexible in its setup.  You may want to look at the following as a possible setup, although ST may be able to give you a better suggestion.

 1) Setup more than 1 MX record with the SAME priority to allow load balancing

2) Use SM free edition for incoming gateway servers (will do all SPAM/AV checks) and maybe a separate one for outgoing servers

3) Use a licensed SM edition (or more than 1 depending on the resources needed) to house the actual web interface and user accounts
 

Thats almost 60 emails per second. I would guess you would need some sort of clustered solution or you need to break it out and use several gateways and several servers to balance the load. What are you using now for email? I would not trust one box to 60 emails a second.

We're using ModusMail by Vircom right now but won't be using it much longer.  It handles the load well but is lacking alot of features and just can't compete when it comes to what the "client" wants and sees.  Our Email clients don't care about Msg/sec or how many machiens we use... they just care about thier webmail and all the features they dont see.

We are running ModusMail on a 3Ghz Dual Xeon box w/4gig Ram and 10k rpm SCSI drives.  The spool is split on to a second drive array using 15k rpm SAS dirves (like most mail servers we see the highest Disk I/O on the spool so we isolated it).  Right now we can spike to processing 90Msg/sec but our overall average is closer to 30Msg/sec  alot of our  mail is internal to the server (from one clien to another) so it bypasses the scanning.

How much spam filtering and Av scanning do you do on this box?

All of it. There are no gateway servers prior to the email server.

Modus scales far better than SM.   I work in an environment with both.  Our ISP customers are on Modus and our hosting customers are on SM.  We originally started using SM for the same reasons you are looking at.  Lack of user features and the fact that I hate dealing with Vircom support.   Unless your planning on a load balanced gateway setup you may find it difficult to use SM in your situation.  

We also use Declude and Message Sniffer.  Both are terrible cpu hogs.  Theres no way you could put them on the same machine running SM.  Especially with decludes track record of poor upgrades.  Every point release sends the cpu in one direction or another.   That said, they outperform our barracuda firewall that we have in front of our Modus server.  Message sniffer does.  Without sniffer you'll find declude is a fairly mediocre product.

Have you thought about just offloading your webmail?  Thats what we ended up doing for the modus clients.  There's alot of good choices out there.  We ended up using Roundcube for the webmail side of things.  It goes through inconsistent development cycles but our users love it compared to the modus interface.

 

-e
 

fullcity,

 Will you contact me offlist at [rbryn at cfwebmasters dot com]? I'de like a bit more detail on the volume and machine specs you are using between smartermail and the machine using declude w/message sniffer.