A Case for a Spam-Aware Mail Server Architecture

The current mail server architecture spawns a new process upon every new connection it receives. The new process deals with the handling of the mail from accepting “Helo” information till the end of the connection. While forking a new process for each separate connection has a lot of advantages in terms of security and modularity, this architecture has severe performance problems in view of increasing unsolicited emails - spams and emails with rogue connections. For example, as spammers resort to guessing email user ids, the number of emails that bounce off a mail server is increasing. For such emails, the mail server spawns a process which wastes its resources. In this paper we propose a new architecture for mail servers, which keeps all the advantages of the process architecture has for receiving mails, but at the same time wastes little server resources in case of bounced emails/rogue connections. Essentially, the new architecture does not fork off a new process until it is c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CEAS
• Authors: Abhinav Pathak, Sabyasachi Roy, Y. Charlie Hu
• Keywords: Architecture, CEAS 2007, Internet Technology, Mail Server Architecture, Mail Servers