PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tag smtp

The original qmail-smtpd accepts by default all messages, checking later for the existence of recipients. So, if the message is delivered to not existing recipients, a lot of additional system work and network traffic are generated, with multiple expensive bouncing if the sender is a fake one. chkuser has been developed with the goal to improve the acceptance SMTP phase of qmail-smtpd. qmail-smtpd patched with chkuser may check the existence of e-mail recipients immediately in the SMTP acceptance phase of a message and rejects instantly all messages not directed to existing users, avoiding additional traffic, work and messages bounced more times.

To test and benchmark several common SMTP servers for Unix. This is inspired by the work done by Matthias Andree at his Postfix vs. qmail - Performance page. His information, while likely still highly relevant is based heavily around file system I/O and not overall performance of the MTA. Additionally, more MTAs and OSs will eventually be tested here.

Due to the increase in the number of ISP's blocking port 25 for third party mailservers I decided to setup my mailserver to answer SMTP request on multiple ports. While this can be accomplished in many ways, such as port forwarding or multiple instances of qmail-smtpd, my situation required setting up a second instance or qmail-smtpd.

Issue 8 provides a guide to deploying Email systems from End to End. Several columns look at each component of an Enterprise grade email solution using Open Source. These articles lead up to a discussion on designing Scalable SMTP Networks. This issue also looks at Voicemail / Email integration with Asterisk.