At the beginning of this month, Security Space published a comprehensive survey of all mail servers visible on the Internet. Out of some 1.2 million servers polled only about 600 thousand produce identifiable header information, and of those over 93% are either Exim or Postfix. Then old Sendmail weighs in at just over 3% and that is followed by a very long tail of a great many all under 1% each.
| Description | Number of Servers | Percent |
| Total Number of MX Servers Queried | 1,201,857 | 100.0% |
| Number of Servers that didn't respond | 232,027 | 19.31% |
| Server didn't open socket | 229,110 | 19.06% |
| Server didn't provide banner | 2,917 | 0.24% |
| Server provided banner | 969,830 | 80.69% |
| Server banner identifies software in use | 609,378 | 50.70% |
See below for a breakdown by type.
Server Type Number of Servers Percent Exim 339,579 55.73% Postfix 229,707 37.70% Sendmail 21,001 3.45% MailEnable 11,106 1.82% MDaemon 2,810 0.46% Microsoft 1,450 0.24% CommuniGate Pro 814 0.13% OpenSMTPD 579 0.10% IMail 487 0.08% XMail 458 0.08% SurgeSMTP 335 0.05% Qmail Toaster 202 0.03% WinWebMail 194 0.03% Lotus Domino 157 0.03% MagicMail 150 0.02% Post.Office 75 0.01% Kerio 72 0.01% Merak 66 0.01% ArGoSoft 42 0.01% GroupWise 41 0.01% Gordano Messaging Suite (GMS) 18 0.00% OpenVMS 10 0.00% InterScan VirusWall 8 0.00% Trend Micro 5 0.00% VisNetic 4 0.00% ModusMail 2 0.00% Mercury 2 0.00% MessageWall 2 0.00% Mirapoint 1 0.00% Neon Mail Server 1 0.00%
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December 2023 Security Space Mail (MX) Server Survey
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by ssvt on Friday December 29, @02:27AM (1 child)
I notice Groupwise has a very tiny presence still!
It was the best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, @04:29AM
Still seems to be supported (v23.4, Oct 2023): https://www.novell.com/documentation/groupwise23/gw_readme/data/gw_readme.html [novell.com]
BTW the link from wiki:
https://community.microfocus.com/img/gw/groupwise/f/discussions/514210/groupwise-18-4-has-been-released [microfocus.com]
The date info says over 2 years ago but if you hover over it it's actually less than 2 years ago (March 2022). Off by one bug?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by crm114 on Friday December 29, @03:01AM (4 children)
Around 200? Company decided to implement SAP. Which meant dealing with people in Germany, who had email addresses that included umlauts. At the time, MS Exchange could not handle those addresses. C Level people were not getting "important emails". We threw in a postfix server in front of the Exchange server, did some simple filtering scripts with (iirc sed)... and all was good.
I wonder how many "exim" or "postfix" servers are just application firewalls for more brittle servers behind them.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, @12:14PM (3 children)
At about the same time I implemented a similar setup, but with Exim handling all inbound and outbound mail. Of course, me being me, it also ended up doing both AV scanning and heavy content based spam filtering as well, rejecting at SMTP level.
This lead to some fun conversations with the people running our (external) backup MX servers, as once we'd rejected the initial messages the sending machines then usually tried the backup MX servers for our domain and found that they would accept them, leading to their queues to start filling up with shit, and logs full of our server telling them to literally FOAD when they tried delivering it to us.
They wanted us to change our setup to accept the junk from their servers...and were not best pleased to be told, IRL by myself and my PHB, exactly the same thing our MTA had been telling them electronically for months.
I'm no longer in the sysadmin/IT game, haven't been for quite a while as the 'politics' finally sickened me enough to the point where I said Basta! ya Bassas and left to do something else...but looking at the logs of the 'hobby' MTA (Exim) for my domains, it's amazing how stupidly persistent the spammers still are...mind you, they do usefully provide a steady stream of dodgy IP addresses for my Frankencode running the automated firewall blocking...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, @05:10PM (2 children)
It's also amusing how spamming levels drop around Christmas... a non-Chinese holiday mind you. And also non-Russian since they have orthodox calendar. So the narrative that spam is Russian/Chinese seems a little .. wrong...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday December 29, @06:11PM (1 child)
So the narrative that spam is Russian/Chinese seems a little .. wrong...
The spam levels drop of the holidays as people turn off their Windoze machines and thus inadvertently power down a large portion of the massive botnets sending the spam. Gone are the days when you could blame the occasion open relay. Spam is now not just another layer of the total cost of ownership for those still running Windows, but also an unnecessary cost inflicted on the rest of us. Redmond continues to ignore these botnets as, for them, they can be explained away as an externality.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Saturday December 30, @10:23PM
I find that interesting.
What I have found is holidays is when VoIP fraud attempts go up. I see increased "door knocking" attempts against all our devices during the holidays as well. Basically, Holidays are "no vacation for you."
But yeah, maybe it is the "windows botnet shuts down." Never thought of that angle before. Thanks!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, @04:24AM (4 children)
That table is basically unreadable if you use a non-default theme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, @04:47AM
In VT100 mode, green text on black is normal, but in the table green on white and green on gray (in the header) are readable (but not great).
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 29, @12:48PM (2 children)
Looks like white on grey with some grey text in it. Not great for reading. Very low contrast between the colours. Very hard to read in that regard. Would have been a lot better if the table didn't have a background colour.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday December 29, @02:53PM (1 child)
My apologies and thanks for pointing that out. I copied the table HTML source from the TFA. I've now removed all of the bgcolor from the HTML and I hope it looks better.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 29, @02:58PM
Looks totally fine and readable now.
(Score: 2, Funny) by DannyB on Friday December 29, @05:00PM
As I seem to recall, a default installation of Windows server is good enough for highly sensitive emails according to Hillary somebody or other.
If the product is good enough for government use, we should all be using it.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday December 29, @05:07PM
I thought that Google run their own incarnation of server. It serves quite a lot of domains... Where is it? Same for outlook and Office 365. So, something stinks about these numbers.