The "everybody" alias

ychaouche

Valued Member
Hi EQ !

I've been asked to create a global alias that encompasses all our inboxes for our HR team to send email to all employees. So for example all@mycompany.com would be an alias to bob@mycompany.com, alice@mycompany.com, clara@mycompany.com etc. I have 300 of them.

The probleme is when I send an e-mail to everybody I get a load of 7.6 on a 8 core system (that's 95%) because of the antivirus software working at full speed. I'm afraid this slows down the system a bit and our users would notice that when they're using the webmail.

What do you recommend ? is it possible to disable the av scan when sending mail to this particular alias from the inside (from one of our mailboxes, not from an outside freemail account for eg. ) ? and is this safe ?

Setup :
Debian - Postfix - Dovecot - Amavis - Clamav - SpamAssassin - Dovecot

Postfix is configured to get all mail through amavis.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
In the SpamAssassin config there are whitelist_from and whitelist_to options that can be used to short circuit how much processing is done for those emails. It depends on the rest of your mail server setup too. If you're scanning at smtp time when the email is received that should help. I'd also recommend running a second interface for internally generated email and configurations so you don't risk exposing email addresses to the internet that could potentially receive and deliver a lot of spam to your users. If each individual user is firing off a new spamc/spamd that could be part of your load issue on a smaller mail server. I remember simscan/qmail being more load friendly than amavis/postfix, not that I'm recommending changing MTA's over this issue, but the extra perl could be hurting too. I checked for a better Q&A related to postfix environments and found this thread - Creating a postfix alias for all users for a to send to all users of a domain The solutions detailed there appear to cover both my concern about the efficiency of the "email all users" alias, and protecting it from receiving spam from the internet.
 

ychaouche

Valued Member
popowich,

Thanks for taking time to answer the question. In fact, the load isn't on spamassassin which can process 300 messages pretty fast but on the clamav antivirus software. Clamav itself is called from amavis, not spamassassin, so maybe I should look for some configuration inside of amavis.
 
Top