A humble opinion is needed

[David While]

I had a messagelabs server end up in my blocked list (using my MailStats program) - checking teh logs indeicated that it was spam that had been received from them.
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David While
Technical Development Manager
Faculty of Computing, Information & English
University of Central England
Tel: 0121 331 6211
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-----Original Message-----
From: Antony Stone [mailto:Antony at SOFT-SOLUTIONS.CO.UK]
Sent: 10 September 2003 15:04
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: A humble opinion is needed


On Wednesday 10 September 2003 2:45 pm, Kevin Anderson wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have had MailScanner installed for quite some time, and it works great,
> still there have been calls that it's not quite good enough.  The latest
> "Manager" wants to get in for discussion "Messagelabs" product for
> spam/virus/porn filtering. www.messagelabs.com.
>
> I would like to keep MailScanner up and running, basically I need some
> info on Messagelabs if they are good or bad or are they using MailScanner
> in the background? :)

I too would be interested in an objective comparison of what MS can do vs.
what MessageLabs offer.

I have no idea whether they use MS in their service - and they probably
wouldn't say if they did (my opinion), however I have heard that:

a) they are very good for anti-virus filtering (because they process so many
emails that they often get to see the very early viruses, before signatures
are available, and can pick them up by filename / filetype checks and then
actually help to get the signatures created); and

b) they are not so good for spam filtering for almost the same reason - they
see so much email that they can't develop a single definition of what is spam.

It might be interesting if anyone is running a MailScanner server on a link
supplied by MessageLabs, to know what sort of spam levels they pick up (I
would be worried if they picked up any viruses at all after being filtered by
ML), as this would give some indication of what MS can do that ML can't (or
doesn't).

Antony.

--

"John Major" and "Cher" are as much abstractions as "the national debt" or
"the state of Welsh rugby".

 - Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind