Far-side email

Far-side email "scrubbing" bandwidth management research
INASP are undertaking a joint research project with two partners; Aidworld and Linux Based Systems Design (LBSD). The project will research the effect of email far-side "scrubbing" on bandwidth use over VSAT Internet connections. Research partners will track the email traffic of participating institutions and collect data on the potential bandwidth savings that far-side scrubbing could offer.

Three organisations, Aidworld, LBSD and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) will conduct the research. INASP will identify potential participants, LBSD will set up the monitoring process and collect the far-side scrubbing data and Aidworld will coordinate the partners and manage the project. All the organisations and the participants will contribute to a joint research paper to be published under a Creative Commons license on the INASP website, Aidworld website and other relevant resources.

It is hoped that this research will demonstrate that significant network traffic data transfers can be saved (i.e. better use of bandwidth) by implementing a relatively simple and low cost far-side scrubbing policy and technical service for organisations working under low bandwidth, high cost and saturated network conditions.

Technical Details

The proposed trial service makes use of ESMTP relaying of mail to a partner's mailserver(s), this is a non-intrusive method and only requires a few modifications on the participating institutions side. Reversion is as quick and simple.

The MX of test partner's domain would need to be changed to point to the trial service mailserver cluster, which will then accept, scan and forward the mail to the partner organization. Various techniques will be applied, modified, removed, or added depending on the participating organizations requirements, to test their impact on data flows over the slow parts of the network (basically over the VSAT link).

Project coordination, management and reporting

Aidworld will be responsible for coordinating the organisations and participants conducting the research and will manage the project. Aidworld will be responsible for delivering a suitable report at the end of the project timeframe.

All research partners will work together to ensure that the research conducted results in a comprehensive report focused on the business case for far-side email scrubbing. this will include data relating to the costs associated with implementing far-side email scrubbing in comparison to the related bandwidth savings and resulting cost and time savings.

The results of this research will be available spring 2007 and fully published here.

Interested partners

Any organisations who would be interested in participating in this research and would like to have their email traffic handled as described, in order to ascertain potential savings they might have in adopting far-side scrubbing, are invited to contact us in order to be considered for involvement in these activities. For further information contact the bandwidth management and optimisation programme manager - Martin Belcher