InfoSecurity show

[Lush, Richard]

>>I can honestly say that there is only one product there that looked any 
>>good and that was MailMarshall. Even then it did fully supply what 
>>MailScanner can.

>Did you mean that, or did you skip a word?

Oopps!  You're right there should have been a 'not' in there. Brain still fried from all those sales and marketing types trying to tell me how good there products aren't...err..I mean are. (or was I right the first time?) :-)


-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Julian Field
Sent: 29 April 2003 21:37
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK

At 21:24 29/04/2003, you wrote:
>I was there today as well.  I had one "salesman" tell me mail came in 
>on port 28 :-)

That doesn't surprise me...

>I can honestly say that there is only one product there that looked any 
>good and that was MailMarshall. Even then it did fully supply what 
>MailScanner can.

Did you mean that, or did you skip a word?

>   I was amazed to see that about 70% of the stands there were to do 
> with spam and email antivirus.

I would have stayed for the demo, but the fake log cabin and the Stetson hats were just too much for me. Worthy of a used-car salesman on a bad day :)

>A stand for MailScanner next year then Julian???

Slight snag there: marketing budget ;-)

>-----Original Message-----
>From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On 
>Behalf Of Julian Field
>Sent: 29 April 2003 15:44
>To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>
>I have just the day (well, quite enough of it!) at the "Info Security" 
>show in London.
>I decided to do the rounds of the show on the premise that I wanted to 
>buy an email anti-virus, and particularly anti-spam, system.
>I have had demos from loads of salesmen trying to flog me their systems.
>
>And my overwhelming response has to be "What a pathetic bunch of products".
>That's the version you can tell your mother-in-law, anyway :-)
>
>They have really sophisticated traps like "the From: domain doesn't 
>match the envelope sender domain" and make a big thing of it. Useful 
>until one of your users joins a mailing list...
>
>The really advanced products have thinly (or sometimes not at all!) 
>disguised copies of DCC. I didn't see one product that could talk to
>Razor2 and DCC. RBL's are quite popular, probably because they are so 
>easy to use.
>No-one had a decent response to "what happens to your incoming mail 
>feed speed if one of the RBL's goes down?". The standard line to that 
>was "well, you can't avoid human intervention completely". In other 
>words, your incoming mail feed would slow to a crawl waiting for every 
>DNS timeout for every message. I even got them to admit that was 
>exactly what would happen.
>
>No product I was shown implemented any decent set of heuristic rules. 
>One or two had the ability to enter regular expressions and give a 
>simple score to each one. But you had to write all the rules yourself, 
>and they only supported 10 rules at most.
>
>1 had a Bayes engine, but it had to be manually trained with spam. It 
>would auto-learn on the assumption that all your outgoing mail was not spam.
>Which is better than nothing, until one of your systems inside gets 
>hacked and used as a spam relay, at which point your entire bayes 
>database is destroyed by being given spam it assumed was non-spam.
>
>And a couple of them gave me price quotes. These were both 
>"appliances", i.e. PC's in 1U boxes. One company wanted $56,000 plus 
>the cost of an anti-virus engine (they only supported a choice of 2). 
>The other one charged £20,000 (approx $32,000) for the basic unit, and 
>you then paid them several thousands of £ for each of their "modules" on top of that.
>
>I hope there are at least 1 or 2 decent commercial products in this 
>market, but I sure didn't see them today, and all the big players were there.
>
>We need to spread the word!
>
>Which brings me onto my next posting.
>--
>Julian Field
>www.MailScanner.info
>Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz MailScanner thanks 
>transtec Computers for their support

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support