F-prot revisited

[Alan Fiebig]

To be able to sleep with an easy conscience at night, I was looking at an extrememly expensive license from F-Prot based upon the number of customer mailboxes I had. Since I do not charge my customers for filtering, I had no way to recoup my expenses. Also note that the F-Prot liscense is 'per year', and not a one time cost.

While F-Prot's $29 Linux workstation version is all you technically need to run with MailScanner, per F-Prot, you would be in violation of their license. Their expensive 'per user' mail server version contains a whole bunch of extra utilities and stuff you would never use, but to meet their license agreement, that's the version you have to purchase.

Back a couple of months ago, Computer Associates (CA) had contacted Julian regarding their license, and Julian posted it on the list. I liked what I saw, and I supplied Jullian with a licensed copy so he could add support for their product, e-Trust, to MailScanner.

The product works great, and is very cost effective. The license will run you around $129 per year, and for that price you get a license to install the product on any 5 hosts, including Windows and Linux servers, workstations, PocketPC PDAs, Groupwise servers, Exchange servers; all versions are included in the box. The 5 node license is the smallest they sell, but at $129 total, I think that's a very good price compared to what I was looking at.

For those of us with many users, and that want to run legally, I'm not aware of a lower priced commercial solution. I do of course also run ClamAV as my second scanner, which is GPL and therfore is free. I just was not comfortable running with only Clam, I like running both a commercial scanner and an Open Source one.

-Alan

>F-Prot says the email version.  I bought a license last spring when it was
>still just $300 a whack.  Now it's based on users and quite expensive IMHO.
>On my secondary mail server I installed F-Secure (and clam).  The F-Secure
>people were willing to work with me pricewise.  You might contact them and
>see what they'll do for you.  F-Prot didn't seem to want to.  Next spring
>when the F-Prot license runs out, I'll roll that machine to F-Secure as
>well...
>
>....Kevin