We’ve recently rebranded our Spamgate system to Trap25. As a standalone product we can move to a more commericial model whilst also keeping the bare engine available for our hosting customers.

One major issue we faced on Spamgate was the fact that the mail relay accepted email for a domain, spam checked it and then relayed to the remote server and asked if the user existed before sending, or indeed bouncing the email. This is very expensive in terms of processor time as essentially the servers are scanning and processing defunct email.

As part of the upgrades to Spamgate to turn it into Trap25 we had to solve this issue. Our own coding has scanned each of our Plesk platforms and compiled a list of all email mailnames, redirects, groups, aliases… everything and added them to a specific type of flat file database called a .cdb file. This, combined with a recompile of our qmail systems to add the appropriate patches allows us to block email at the network level after a check of this database.

End users will see no benefit to this system as all it serves to do is reduce to spamassassin load on our scanning servers allowing us to scale them further.

Refer to: Trap25 for more details of this new project if you’re interested.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.