[Fwd: Re: Complete Virus Scanner Review]

[Stephen Swaney]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 07:13, Martin Sapsed wrote:

> Hi Julian,
>
> Julian Field wrote:
> > Sorry for the plug, but Fortress Systems Ltd (www.fsl.com) are becoming a
> > Sophos partner and know all about MailScanner and so should be able to get
> > you good pricing for use in this environment.
>
> Do you know fsl's opinion of the new Sophos mail/virus/spam product?
> Surely as a Sophos partner they will be obliged to promote it won't they???


FSL is not a Sophos reseller. Until yesterday Sophos had no anti-spam
solution and the Sophos US sales force had little or no pre-sale
technical support.

FSL has recently worked with Sophos US sales team, assisting them with
technical pre-sales support when their customers needed assistance to
install Sophos MailScanner and SpamAssassin. Prior to this, their sales
force had been recommending Amavis-d over their own gateway software.
For the last couple of months several of the Sophos salesmen have been
recommending MailScanner as the preferred solution, especially when the
prospective customer wanted anti-spam software. Note that it has been
easier to sell anti-spam software + anti-virus software than just
anti-virus software. Probably the reason they spent $28M to buy active
state.

We charged the Sophos prospects - customers for our work installing or
reconfiguring MailScanner to work with Sophos and SpamAssassin and we
were grateful for the business leads. I found their salesmen to be
honest, pleasant and easy to work with.

We have never had any contact with their technical staff although on at
least two occasions we pointed out problems and asked our sales contacts
to pass the information on to their support teams. We never had any
response.

On the technical merits of their products:

I use and pay a healthy price for their SAV anti-virus on our service
bureau email scanners. I am not aware of any virus or worm getting
through our scanners in the +2 years I've used the product. I have no
problem recommending using this product on an email gateway.

I believe their desktop solution is the "lightest weight" product to use
on the clients - especially if you have remote users who download over
dial-up connections. The updates are very small files. I have not used
the product but have heard good reports from our clients who do use the
product.

I have never used their mailmonitor software. Why would anyone want to
when we have MailScanner. Even reading their own marketing material,
MailScanner provides much more functionality and it is a bit less
expensive. Is mailmonitor really an "Open relay" by default?

I don't know effective the activestate anti-spam software is but I do
know:

We're getting +99.5% detection of spam on our spampot. This is a system
that's been up for years and receives over 10,000 spam a day. There are
no valid addresses on this system so it's easy to calculate how much
spam is detected. We have done some Bayesian tuning on the system but
not a lot more than that. Also the system is still running SpamAssassin
2.55. On the systems we've upgraded to 2.60, we're seeing better spam
detection.

We obviously have a bias but we strongly believe that there is simply
nothing better than MailScanner and SpamAssassin for reliably processing
and filtering email on a gateway. We believe it's used at more sites to
process more email than any single commercial product.

The problem is very few IT people in the commercial world:

     1. Have heard of the MailScanner and SpamAssassin
     2. Don't - won't use open source software (yet)
     3. Believe "the more they pay, the better the solution"

In short, they are victims of the marketing FUD and lies of many of the
commercial vendors.

We hope to rectify that situation by effectively marketing support for
MailScanner and SpamAssassin.

Steve


> Have you looked at it at all - presume you're not throwing in the towel
> yet?! ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Sapsed
> Information Services               "Who do you say I am?"
> University of Wales, Bangor             Jesus of Nazareth


Stephen Swaney
President
Fortress Systems, Ltd.
www.FSL.com
Steve.Swaney at FSL.com
Phone: 202 338-1670
Fax:202 448-2969
U.S. Toll Free Phone and Fax: 877 746-6636

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