Emails in Numbers

The article analyzes the results of independent tests performed by PC Magazine Romania comparing the AXIGEN Mail Server against two open source alternatives, Sendmail (with Dovecot) and Postfix (with Cyrus):

We thought of conducting a comparative performance study for three solutions that cover the four basic functions of electronic messaging: message receiving, their delivery to the user’s mailboxes, message storage and user accessing stored emails. Two usage scenarios were considered: business and ISP.

The three tested solutions are:

• Sendmail (message receiving and delivery) + Dovecot (message storage and access)
• Postfix (message receiving and delivery) + Cyrus (message storage and access)
• AXIGEN (complete solution)

The tests consisted in sending messages with a predetermined size to the servers and checking their acceptance in the users’ mailboxes. The large number of spam messages from the total traffic of received email messages (estimated by Radicati, in 2007, at 72% of all traffic) generates frequent periods of intensive server usage. To verify the servers’ ability to respond in overload conditions, their response time to requests on 1, 2, 4 and 8 parallel connections was tested.

Report originally published in PC Magazine Romania.

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