• August has equalled the previous worst month on record (May 2004) with c. 33% good vs. 67% blocked/filtered.
  
• Within this mixture, spam is up, viruses are slightly down and real email is also slightly down (holiday season).
  
• Another milestone has been broken - for the first time ever not a single one of the c. 14,500 attempts to deliver email to our non-preferred MX was legitimate - yes, 100% spam and viruses at the high preference number MX (actually measured at a little over 100% but there is a margin of error of c. 0.2%) - more details of this below

Some additional commentary

The above graph shows volume normailised to 100%. Here is the same graph showing absolute volume.

MX100 (less preferred MX)

• I have enlarged the bottom section of the graph for the past three months. The known good bar finally disappears altogether in August.
  
• See also "Count your MXes" and "DNSBL stats for May 2003 (risk of abuse of secondary MX)"

Categories exploded

Whitelists:

• Local
  
• Bonded Sender

DNSBL:

• DSBL
  
• SORBS
  
• Local
  
• Spamcop
  
• Spamhaus
  
• ORDB
  
• Various blackholes.us zones

Policy:

• Non-existent sender domain
  
• Bogus HELO/EHLO
  
• No such user
  
• Rejected sender or recipient
  
• Third party relay

Content violations:

• Reported spam
  
• Trapped spam
  
• Viruses (including virus bounces and bogus warnings)

1. Stoomaroo04/09/2004 04:01:47

Hrrmm...

Why not set up a rule to deny all traffic to Secondary MXs if the primary is up and running? (many a little obtuse in terms of policy?)

Stoomaroo

2. Chris Linfoot06/09/2004 09:10:19

I had thought about that but it is difficult to do and almost impossible to make sufficiently robust.

One thought that did occur to me was just to turn off the seconadry MX and leave it off. Primary is sufficiently reliable and outages of any sort sufficiently rare to make that a realistic possibility here.

I may try it for a day or two and see what happens.

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