Email Server

Contrary to many's expectations, the email server is one the hardest to maintain servers, compared to the common types of servers the likes of web servers, VOIP servers, database servers and proxy servers. I will first clarify what I mean here by an Email Server. It is certainly not the computer you maintain in your office for your own personal use or for a company of a few employees. I am talking about a commercial email server hosting thousands of email accounts and sending and receiving hundreds of thousands of emails daily.

Why is Email Server so special out of the list? Well we need to thank two problematic areas, the first is spamming and the second is virus. I would estimate that at least 90% of all emails are viruses and spams. Spammers are now a profession in many Third world countries and are controlled by crime syndicates and so are virus emails. So how did these two menaces cause problems for the Email Server? Spamming typically choke up the Email Server resources by its continuous blasting and virus emails used up all the resources when the virus scanners are in operations to check each and every single email for spams or viruses. Hence for an Email Server to serve the public, its I/O and its protection is of prime considerations compared to web servers and the likes.