MailScanner review/comparisons?

[Jason Burzenski]

Pete,

1.  MailScanner won't cost you, up front, per user, per domain, per cpu or
annually for subscription as most of these services are scaled.  Make a case
for spending this money on another security initiative (like enterprise
antivirus or ids).  Cost is going to be your big win or even a great tie
breaker with most management.  Anti-spam tools have the marketing materials
painted on thick whereas MS relies more on it's track record for advertising
so it may be hard to argue in it's favor without doing a side by side
comparison.  Therefore even if you can't win the argument outright, try to
match it feature for feature against the commercial competitor, and then
play the cost card to win the deal.

2.  Customization of filtering rules.  Most anti-spam products tout a set it
and forget it mentality, and rely on standard rulesets and spam signatures.
You will need to customize any anti-spam solution to your industry to reduce
false positives and increase effectiveness.

3.  You know what's running under the hood.  There is value in knowing that
there are specific develop efforts driving each of the major components in
MS.  In some cases, you can swap out components to make the right fit for
your organization.  This gives you a greater level of flexibility from most
commercial offerings because you have total control over everything from the
MTA to logging.

4.  Because you only pay for the hardware, you can build a redundant system
as a failover or load balance several machines very easily and without
incuring any licensing additional cost (with the exception of anti-virus
scanners).  Scalability should be important to any growing organization.

5.  COUNTERARGUMENT:  "yeah, but product X comes with support."  You can
also get commercial support for MS, its components and the operating system.

Hope this helps.

On a note of personal experience, the commercial products I have evaluated
have been relatively high on false positives, low on percentages of spam
caught, weak on customer service and/or overpriced.  If you do decide to go
with a commercial tool, make sure they give you a trial period so you can
back out and build a real tool if you need to.

Jason

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pete [mailto:pete at eatathome.com.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 9:18 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: MailScanner review/comparisons?
>
>
> the company i work for has been given to another company -
> the new parent company have this IT dept that is HELL BENT on
> using every Microsoft product around and pretty much hate
> *nix - which is greaaaat, as we all love *nix. They wanna
> ditch our Domino env and replace with exchange = grrr.
>
> I piped up and said, how about checking out our MailScanner
> server, we can easily scan all your mail too - well, they
> said nah we are getting this new fandangled etrust content
> server which costs some big dollars, its the best content
> scanner available to mankind etc. Fine i said,  i will leave
> it at that.
>
> Next thing i know these guys are all bagging MailScanner to
> my bosses saying it cannot do all this really basic stuff
> (like stop heaps of
> spam/viruses) - my broses comes to me and say, explain to us
> how is MailScanner better than this commercial product - what
> are we missing out on?
>
> I tried to explain to him that even if we use our own
> experience only as an example, we dont get any email borne
> viruses, we have trapped xx spam, we never get complaints
> from users about receiving spam etc etc But this is not
> enough to combat the people in powerful positions who are
> pushing their own barrow.
>
> If you have ever seen a review or professional comment on
> MailScanner i would love to hear about it, please post a
> link, or scanned attachment if from a magazine to assist me
> in building my some form of case against these heathens.
>
> Any other suggestions of comments really appreciated.
> thanks
> Pete
>
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