MailScanner replacements

[Julian Field]

Let's all play "spot the snake oil".

"Its unique multi-layered approach stops all spammer attacks".
Yeah, right.

"24/7 Sieve script auto-updates"
Ooh, great, all your spam are belong to us.
I wonder how long it will be before the spammers start polluting their 
database of scripts. You have to submit 50 lines of script, which they 
claim they will check, before you get to be a "member of the coalition". 
Must be a bit like finding weapons of mass destruction :-)

People like Razor use far more sophisticated anti-pollution mechanisms 
based on dynamic evaluations of the history of your spam submissions 
compared against other people's submissions.

Call a cynical old git if you like...

At 14:23 04/07/2003, you wrote:
>I just browsed over vircom's site... they have something called Anti-SPAM
>Gate (http://www.vircom.com/Enterprise/Solutions/antispamgate/) without a lot
>of info about it...
>
>AFAICS, it uses Sieve for filtering... Sieve is a relatively new standard
>language for mail filtering... it is being incorporated on some mail clients
>and server as a filtering language so users can write scripts based on
>message properties or contents and filter every incoming message... IIRC, you
>can accept, bounce, drop, copy/move to a certain folder based on things
>inside the message.
>
>The only open source server I recall using it is CMU's cyrus imap server...
>incidentally, I think the language was developed by people at CMU :-)
>
>I also recall a couple of mail clients using it... I think recent versions of
>Cyrusoft Mulberry (payware) use it for locally filtering.
>
>Now, Sieve is a fine language for filtering, but, in itself, it's nothing
>else... It is interesting that, being standard, once you learn to filter in
>Sieve, you can carry your scripts from client to server, or test in the
>client, then copy to server, etc...
>
>I don't recall it can do fancy things as scoring, de-html, etc... For what I
>see in vircom site, the advantage of Sieve is that you, as a paying customer
>can contribute to vircom so other paying customers take advantage of your
>experience... I don't think it is nowhere near what spamassassin, razor, dcc
>do... openly and for free :-)
>
>El 4 Jul 2003 a las 9:59, Peter Peters escribió:
>
> > Sometimes other (not as good as) MailScanner replacements pop up. A few
> > days ago (yes, I'm behind on my e-mail) my boss forwarded me an e-mail
> > from/about Vircom/Sieve. Anybody any experience with this?
> >
> > It looks as if it does the same as MailScanner only they claim the have
> > something called Sieve that is something "new". And it is update trough
> > information gathered at 15 ISP's.
> >
> > --
> > Peter Peters, senior netwerkbeheerder
> > Dienst Informatietechnologie, Bibliotheek en Educatie (ITBE)
> > Universiteit Twente,  Postbus 217,  7500 AE  Enschede
> > telefoon: 053 - 489 2301, fax: 053 - 489 2383, http://www.utwente.nl/civ
>
>
>--
>Mariano Absatz
>El Baby
>----------------------------------------------------------
>The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should,
>therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
>               -- E. W. Dijkstra

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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