Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Overview of this book

As a busy administrator, you know Spam is a major distraction in todays network. The effects range from inappropriate content arriving in the mailboxes up to contact email addresses placed on a website being deluged with unsolicited mail, causing valid enquiries and sales leads to be lost and wasting employee time. The perception of the problem of spam is as big as the reality. In response to the growing problem of spam, a number of free and commercial applications and services have been developed to help network administrators and email users combat spam. Its up to you to choose and then get the most out of an antispam solution. Free to use, flexible, and effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam application. Its unique combination of power and flexibility make it the right choice. This book will now help you set up and optimize SpamAssassin for your network.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
SpamAssassin
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Introduction
Glossary

Performance Improvement Methodology


There are many changes that can be made that will affect the performance of an email processing server. Making unstructured changes may improve the performance, but applying a methodology will allow the impact of changes to be measured and maximize performance in a shorter time frame.

  1. 1. Define performance parameters: Without defining what is to be improved, the process of improving performance can never finish. Parameters that might be chosen include the length of time taken to process an email, the maximum CPU load on the server, the number of concurrent emails to be handled, the success rate of spam filtering, and so on. The choice of parameters and their values should be specific to the site.

  2. 2. Measure the current performance: Tools may exist, or may have to be written, to assist in this. Parsing of system logs will give information on times to process emails, from receipt to delivery. Tools such as sar allow measurement of disk I/O and CPU usage....