Had a report this morning of very slow delivery of a test email from PCI. PCI is an external mass-mailing service which is used by several departments for sending messages to all students. It is also the mechanism for sending the twice weekly eDigest.
A quick analysis of email handling my the McAfee appliances over the last seven days revealed that of the ~1 million messages accepted for further scanning (~500k other sources were blocked outright) ~350k were passed on to MessageScreen for more inspection.
How many messages arrived from PCI? ~35k – or around 10% of all inbound email!
In order to expedite delivery of these email I created a new policy on the McAfee appliances. 99.9% of the PCI email originated from the same IP address so the policy triggers on this. Messages from this IP are now not scanned in any way, shape or form and are directly relayed to GWSMTP2 and thence to users mailboxes.
GWSMTP2 is a GroupWise GWIA running on SUSE Linux and is also the GWIA used for emergency email delivery. It does no standard email processing but is a failover outbound gateway should GWSMTP1 fail.
I have asked for some test messages to be generated to check the new delivery mechanism but the big test will be the next mass email campaign.
