While going through my current server dilemas, I was a Fry’s shopping for RAM. I ended up in a conversation with a nice guy about RAID arrays and MS Exchange.
He mentioned in the conversation that MS Exchange represent 68% of email server sales. It didn’t dawn on me till later that qmail and sendmail are free and therefore can’t be sold. It kind of squews the numbers when you can’t compete against free stuff.
The real question is what percentage of email is sent from what kind of servers on the Internet, not who sells the most.
Of course I’m a huge fan of qmail. It does more for me and more easily the MS Exchange and I’ve supported 5 to 7 different MS Exchange installations. I’ve also spent more long nights repairing exchange than I’ve ever spent supporting qmail, and when I was doing that for qmail it was bad code that I wrote!
The next real question is what [[EmailServer:email servers]] do [[EmailSpammers:spammers]] use. I’d expect it to be [[QmailEmailServer:qmail]] or sendmail, perhaps some custom [[EmailSpammers:spammer]] only email software.
For about a week now I’d been collecting the [[IpAddress:IP addresses]] for every server that connects to my email server. It’s part of an [[IpDatabase:IP Address database]] that I’m working on at http://ipd.spiderhunter.com . I got to thinking that it wouldn be too hard to run a quick [[RealtimeBlackholeList:RBL]] query on some [[IpAddress:IPs]] that are sending email. Fitler out the ones that send the [[SpamMessages:spam]] and do some telnet queries to identify the [[EmailServer:email server]].
Not too hard, but is it worth the time and effort ….
