A Case for a Spam-Aware Mail Server Architecture

The current mail server architecture spawns a new process upon every new connection it receives. The new process deals with the handling of the mail from accepting “Helo” information till the end of the connection. While forking a new process for each separate connection has many advantages in terms of security and modularity, this architecture has severe performance implications in view of increasing unsolicited emails spams and emails with rogue connections. We propose a new architecture for mail servers, that retains the advantages of the process architecture for receiving mails, but at the same time wastes little server resources in case of bounced emails/rogue connections. Essentially, the new architecture does not fork off a new process until it is certain that the mail will not get bounced. We experimentally show that the new architecture use server resources more efficiently.