Trends Coming soon to a CPU near you: 2,500 SMTP connections per second By Ken Simpson | 2 minute read For those of you who are interested in truly mind-blowing technology, I have a pre-announcement to make. In the first quarter, MailChannels will be releasing a project code-named “T-Rex,” which we have been quietly working on for the past several months. T-Rex is the next generation of our Traffic Control email traffic shaping software, and its primary distinction is having the ability to handle up to 2,500 SMTP connections per second on a modest Pentium-4 class machine and well over 100,000 concurrent SMTP sessions. By comparison, most email security systems can handle at most perhaps 100 connections per second. With this kind of capacity, organizations that process email for millions of users will be able to trim their inbound infrastructure to as little as one tenth of its previous size, processing 220M connections per day on each mail server. When launched in Q1, T-Rex will sport the following list of tantalizing features: Lightning-fast in-memory reputation databases, updated from any rsync-able reputation system source such as the Spamhaus datafeed or the MailChannels Reputation Network. Detailed per-connection logging, complete with an intuitive web-2.0-style log-search interface that helps admins diagnose deliverability issues in seconds. True MTA load balancing, enabling intelligent spreading of SMTP traffic across a cluster of MTAs. No new hardware and no routing changes required: works at the application layer, reducing deployment complexity. Full support for SSL – including support for encryption acceleration hardware – enabling transport security at blinding speed. We’ve lined up some large sites to help us test and launch T-Rex. If you’re interested in joining us as a beta tester, please fill in the form.