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 o 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 ecien tly.
['Abhinav Pathak', 'Sabyasachi Roy', 'Y. Charlie Hu']
A Case for a Spam-Aware Mail Server Architecture