Slooow junk mail filter?

I'm very happy with the junk mail filter because it is exceptionally effective at keeping the spam out and letting the ham in. Great.

What's not so great is the enormous delay in the filtering. I've sent a test message to myself from an external (whitelisted!) address, and it took almost an hour to be processed through the DH mail servers. Here are the headers that show that the DH mail servers are the bottleneck (I've munged the e-mail addresses). It's plain to see that the mail arrived at DH at 04:50 but it was only delivered to my mailbox at 05:46 = 56 minutes delay!

What can Dreamhost do to reduce this delay?

From: External address <abcd@abcd.com>
Subject: test
To: abcd@abcd.dk
Message-ID: <OFD8EC21CC.B7246988-ONC1256FBF.004689B0-C1256FBF.004697FC@abcd.com>
Sender: Torben Gundtofte-Bruun <abcd@abcd.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 13:50:53 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

TorbenGB

> What can Dreamhost do to reduce this delay?

Simply deploy hardware adequate to provide the service they offer. But since this hasn't happened in the months since this problem was identified, I would not hold your breath. What's really sad is that DH removed the previous junk solution (Razor) before getting its replacement into a usable state.

Chrisjj,

Actually DH are aware of this issue and have moved several times on deploying (and actually are still deploying) extra processing power to handle this style of spam filtering. If you have ever looked at the kind of overhead spam filtering generates then you might get an idea on just how expensive this solution is.

All that said and done, DH have not adequately intergrated spam filtering into the control panel nor into the webmail clients (other than webmail2) again DH are aware of this and spam filtering is still a ongoing project.

I have noticed this in the past and actually raised several support tickets on this (a cron job took 2 hours to email me the output).

I was told that DH is in the process of deploying several new machines to handle the huge overhead spam filtering is generating. Lets hope those machines come soon because email delays are a serious issue. :(

> (other than webmail2)

Including webmail2 in my opinion. The integration is very poor and even if performance was acceptable I would not be able to offer the JF to my clients simply because the usability, compatibility and security are all so bad.

Usability: e.g. the quarantine message list is an utter mess. When I tested it recently I found wrong From addresses, wrong times (apparently converted to some unspecified server timezone), subjects cut short, subjects undecoded and no way to read a message before moving to Inbox.

Compatibility: very sad to see JF incompatible with other DH features like catch-all addresses, existing webmail.domain access, forwarding etc. esp. since this is a big fall-back from the previous spam defence it has now replaced.

Security: quarantine excluded from the data backup! And purge quarantined messages after 30 days, regardless of where business processes requiring and storage availability affording longer.

Overall the JF is a disappointing blot on the DH landscape. It is very sad DH had to release something so unfinished into production.

I agree with everybody's comments.

Still, I must say to DH's defence that I would actually rather have it this way than the way it was pre-JF! Because the JF filtering is so effective, I can live with a lot of extra effort.

TorbenGB

+ SA reports are not being mailed out. Without reports, SA becomes useless for POP3 access.