Google Domain Apps
This week we’re ditching our old Mail Server and letting Google host our email for us. This is a brief history of our e-mail service.
Originally a member of our congregation, Darrin Stratton of 3000toys.com, donated mail hosting for chcchurch.org. All was well and good, but then we decided we needed some kind of SPAM filtering service, so we used Appriver. It was OK, but we still got plenty of SPAM, and there were frequent false positives. Then Darrin decided to switch hosting companies, and we were losing our mail hosting. So I made the decision to host our own email and setup our own SPAM filtering. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given any $$ to make this transitiong, so I reused one of our old file servers. I setup OpenSuSE 10 with PostFix on a PIII700 as our Mail Server. I added another NIC to our OpenBSD firewall/router server and setup the Mail Server on it’s own IP subnet. I then used spamd, which works in conjunction with pf on OpenBSD to filter out SPAM. Overall this setup works very well. The problem is that the hardware I’m using for all of this doesn’t quite work as I wished it did. We’ve been having some performance problems on our network, and I believe the Mail Server is causing the bottleneck. First of all there appears to be an IRQ problem with the NIC in the router that’s connected to the Mail Server. This could be fixed by using a different NIC, but I don’t really have one any better than the one that’s in there, nor do I have the budget to get a decent NIC. Secondly, the more rules a packet has to go through in pf, the longer it takes to process that packet, and most of the rules in pf are related to the Mail server and SPAM filtering. By removing the Mail server from our network, it should remove any problems we have by having 3 NIC’s and cut down packet filtering processing by 75%. Not having all mail and SPAM come to our IP should also cut down on some of our incoming bandwidth. I’m hoping to see a huge increase in performance when this is all done. On top of all that, I don’t believe we could find a more reliable server than Google, and their SPAM filtering seems to be topnotch. So overall, this should be a pretty sweet transition. I’ll let you know how it actually turns out in a couple of weeks.