Since the latest SPAM outbreaks started last October we have been dealing with adhoc problems with huge delays in mail delivery. MSNBC calls it “Spam is back and worse than ever” so it’s natural to assume that its your SPAM filtering thats the culprit in message delays.
Not quite with ExchangeDefender.
But I have to play along and troubleshoot everything that makes us look bad – and customer is always right so if they say they aren’t getting mail on time we have to look. The delays are global, the delays are significant…. why? Image spam.
ExchangeDefender blocks out nearly all image spam out there but you have to understand the global impact made to the email systems when the size of spam goes from 1–5K to 100–300K per message. Look at your storage and bandwidth requirements for mail in August. Now multiply it by 50 to 100 times for the fact that images require a lot more bandwidth than your average text based message.
On the surface the difference of up to 100 Kb per message isn’t that big of a deal… until you multiply it by 10–20,000 images an average 20 user company gets in a day. If you consider that nearly 80% of SPAM comes in during regular business hours you see that you’re moving 100–200 MB per hour. Add that to your regular business web/IM/VoIP traffic and the network response time starts to become an issue.
This is by no means scientific but it is what we’ve been seeing over the last few months. We’re currently designing mail latency troubleshooting systems that will hopefully be in place over the next two weeks or so and let you do latency tests on your own. Stand by…
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