Upgrades finished and Mail adjustments

**NexDog** · 05-20-2004, 07:13 PM

All shared and reseller servers Alpa to Lamda have been upgraded to Plesk 7.02. We still have a few things to clean up like SpamAssassin settings but we are working on that. We have made some adjustments to SMTP connections so you will find that sending mail is much faster now. Also, the tagline from Horde webmail has been removed from all servers.

Due to large scale email overuse, we have had to disable the anti-virus filter on the following servers:

Gamma
Delta
Eta
Zeta
Theta

I hope you will agree that is much more important to keep the servers fast and stable so if you are on one of those servers, please rely on your own anti-virus software and not on the server.

middleground · 05-21-2004, 04:51 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by NexDog

Due to large scale email overuse, we have had to disable the anti-virus filter on the following servers:

Gamma
Delta
Eta
Zeta
Theta

I hope you will agree that is much more important to keep the servers fast and stable so if you are on one of those servers, please rely on your own anti-virus software and not on the server.

I'm not agreeing with that one....large scale email overuse makes it sound like it is our fault....

Theta has Zero downtime this month and is always pretty darn good. So not sure the need to disable stuff to make it more stable...??

Curious- My spam has doubled since the AV turned off, seems to me that it just makes it worse by increasing the volume of emails, and the size of the attachments, by turning off the AV. Isn't this in turn increasing the load on the email system.

As a note- are there plans to disable on other servers. I just moved my company to HN and that was a selling point...If it goes away, afraid they will override me and we'll be movig away from HN...

**NexDog** · 05-21-2004, 05:16 AM

Clamscan having to kill hundreds of viruses a minute puts a lot more strain on the server than qmail just processing the mail. But qmail is having to process so much email and with the av daemon and spam daemon on top, the load is always high. I don't think the load dropped below 4 all day when I monitored it. Now Clamscan is off, the load is 0.4 which is what it should be.

I'm all for the AV filter but not at the expense of having servers crawling along. Do people want fast websites or no viruses in email. I wish we could provide both but it looks like we can't on some servers where email activity is high.

**NexDog** · 05-21-2004, 05:19 AM

I just re-enabled clamscan on Theta and the load jumped to 4 right away.

middleground · 05-21-2004, 06:28 AM

Thanks for trying....

(and the explanation)

Are we overloaded on Theta?? (users)

**NexDog** · 05-21-2004, 06:33 AM

Theta has alot of large resellers, no doubt about that. I'm going to discuss this problem with Adrian because anti-virus is a very popular and also very needed feature. If we can't identify any abusers or do anything to optimise things, I might decide to bite the bullet and migrate Theta to a new Pent IV 3.06ghz machine. Apart from being more expensive, migrating is always a pain but if it has to be done, it has to be done. We'll see....

middleground · 05-21-2004, 06:35 AM

Thank you sir (....does he have that cricket bat...)....may I have another

Britain Crooker · 05-21-2004, 07:17 AM

While I think it is great that HN has AV on (some of) their servers, it sounds like some users may have the stance of "If the server has AV on its email, I don't need it on my machine." This is a bit dangerous. Even if HN has AV running on each and every server, there is always the possiblity that one will get through. Also there is always the possiblity that a user may get infected via a download from a web site or (more recently) via a file sent through MSN messenger.

My recommendations to my users are to always keep the latest version of a good AV product (I have always liked Norton) on the machine. If it is on the email server as well, all the better.

Out of curiosity, what does Clamscan do when it finds a virus? Does it strip the attachment and then allow the email to pass through with additional message stating what happened? Or does it simply delete the email?

Just my $0.02.

Regards,

Britain Crooker

pccltd · 05-21-2004, 07:27 AM

I havent been with HN long and im not a huge reseller (yet). But my customers all expect their emails to be virus scanned, thats what i promised them when they signed up. If we stop antivirus i have to tell my customers i can no longer provide that. It wont be good, but imagine the huge impact on the large resellers. In
responce to your question middleground aside from the last couple of days I've not had any problems with Theta. I would also voice the question of too many users.

**MikeMann** · 05-21-2004, 07:47 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Britain Crooker
My recommendations to my users are to always keep the latest version of a good AV product (I have always liked Norton) on the machine. If it is on the email server as well, all the better.

I'd completely agree with that (course I use AVG)

All of the virus attempts I get are from websites (not email) and I guess I can count myself one of the lucky ones that I don't get any emails with viruses