[TriLUG] RR Mail Infrsastructure (was RE: e-mail server class)

[Ben Pitzer]

Lance,

What Steve said in the other email is correct.  I've refrained from telling
anyone publicly what the email system we used before was.  There was much
speculation that it was Exchange, which was untrue.  MCIS was MUCH older
than Exchange.  Well, actually, they were developed about the same time,
with MCIS being focused towards ISP-class deployments, and Exchange in
corporate or organizational deployments.  MCIS was a decent system, and
usually quite stable.  The fact that MS rolled all of MCIS' functionality
into Exchange later, and quite supporting MCIS could largely be blamed for
why some of the more serious outages over the last year happened.
Basically, the spammers and viruses got smarter, and MCIS didn't get updates
to cope with some of the new stuff out there which occasionally caused
issues.  Not trying to blow my own horn here, but quite frankly, given the
nature of some of the issues, we did very well to keep things running as
well as they have until the recent mail cutover.  The new mail system, as
Steve said, is Unix-based, but I won't tell you exactly what it is for the
same reasons I didn't tell anyone about MCIS.  Suffice it to say that it
scales much better, but really any mail system used to give the level of
service that we are trying to provide (high-speed broadband, always on, x
number of customers, etc) is going to have some issues.  I think I mentioned
something about this last fall when I gave my brief 5 (okay, 15) minute talk
on the differences between dialup and broadband ISPs.  If anyone wants to
hear that stuff again, I'll be glad to share again.

I've said before that there is no mail system out there that will handle
what we're throwing at it without at least some customer affecting issues,
be it Open Source, Microsoft, or other.  We simply make the best choice for
our customers and for our business given the offerings that are there.  I
think we've made a solid choice here, and with the diligence of myself and
my coworkers (all very solid engineers), you should see the quality of
service you get from RR either improve where it can, and stay high where it
is already so.

As always, if you have questions about RR service, ask.  I'll tell you what
I can without either violating my NDA or otherwise compromising security (I
know, security through obscurity, but even with all of the firewalling in
the world, it's just not a good idea to tell a mailing list like this what
you're running).  Some folks have their problems with RR, and so long as
they're willing to listen, so am I.  Often enough, customer issues with ISPs
and other service companies come from some lack of understanding about the
issues involved in providing that service.  I'll be glad to do what I can to
help folks understand RR's services, and how we can all make sure that
things run smoothly.  Thanks.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer

---------------------------------------------

"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety
 deserve neither liberty nor safety."
 --Ben Franklin--




> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-admin at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-admin at trilug.org]On Behalf
> Of Lance A. Brown
> Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 11:46 AM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: [TriLUG] RR Mail Infrsastructure (was RE: e-mail server class)
>
>
> I've had my SmartHost set to RR for over a year and only rarely have
> problems getting mail delivered in a timely fashion.  It's the inbound
> email that was so nasty I got off it completely.
>
> On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 11:06, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> > Some might argue that there is a speed/latency issue here, but
> the fact is
> > that RR's outbound servers are working just fine these days.
> Better than
> > ever, in fact, and we are going to be doing some rebuilds and
> tuning in the
> > coming weeks to improve them even further, and implement outbound spam
> > filtering, so that if a customer's PC does get infected by a
> virus, it will
> > stand a much smaller chance of getting spread to anyone else.
>
> This statement leads me to believe you work for RR and/or have some
> contact with their mail infrastructure.
>
> If so, can you share any information on why they are using Microsoft
> products for their mail infrastructure instead of a UNIX or Linux
> solution?  It seems to me it would be a LOT smarter to use a UNIX/Linux
> solution.
>
> Thanks,
>   --[Lance]
>
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