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PerfectMail is Fast!
PerfectMail was designed from first principles to be fast. PerfectMail achieves this by
using the fastest, most efficient development tools combined with a blazingly fast proprietary
database.
In fact, PerfectMail is so fast, it can often finish a complete scan of an e-mail in as little
as 0.04 seconds. Here is an extract from the PerfectMail added e-mail headers for a
recently scanned e-mail:
X-PM-Result: Warning=0 and Error=0 values under Tag/Reject threshold - MAIL ACCEPTED FOR DELIVERY
X-PM-Stats_Update: Stats database updated successfully
X-PM-Scan_Conn: 0 previous connections.
X-PM-Scan_Time: Scan completed in 0.5016s wall clock time, User CPU 0.0180s, System CPU: 0.0220s
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Efficient Implementation
The volume of e-mail flowing through an e-mail server can fluctuate wildly. Similarly, e-mail
itself can range from short plain text documents to multi-part e-mails with multiple
attachments using different encoding techniques. In order to ensure the smooth delivery of
save, secure e-mail, any filter must be fast and efficient.
The Right Language
PerfectMail was programmed in the C programming language. This is the same programming
language used to develop Linux and much of Microsoft Windows. C is the hands-down winner
in producing the fastest running code possible.
Many competing tools use scripting or interpreted languages that can execute up to 100 times
slower than C. These tools are good for personal antispam protection or for low volume
server implementations. But, they bog down and consume excessive CPU resources under higher
e-mail activity.
A recent event at XPMsoftware helped identify just exactly how important speed really is!. A
client system malfunctioned and started blasting e-mail at us. This system normally sends one
e-mail an hour - but on April 15/16, it sent over 2,000 e-mails an hour. Here's the graph:
We monitored PerfectMail while during this spike in traffic and were pleasantly suprised to
find that PerfectMail:
- Could easily sustain e-mail transfer rates of 2,000+ transactions per hour
- Didn't miss a single e-mail
- Host CPU utilization never exceeded 30%
- Overall scan times didn't suffer during the surge.
So from these numbers we can deduce that our PerfectMail powered appliance could easily handle
more than 6,000 e-mails per hour before stressing its Intel Celeron 2.0ghz CPU.
The Right Database
PerfectMail uses a proprietary back end database to record details of every e-mail transaction.
This database is consulted whenever a new e-mail is received. When an e-mail is scored, it's
calculated spam value is compared against historical data.
By introducing historical data into the scoring process, we get a better perspective of the
overall trustworthiness of the sender. Much like a business would consult your credit history
before accepting your check, PerfectMail consults the senders past history before making a
final decision on accepting an e-mail.
As you can see from the (above) PerfectMail headers, the database (recorded
as System CPU) was well under 3/100th of a
second.
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