Justification for mailscanner.

[Stephen Swaney]

________________________________________
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of Limmer, Jim
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 4:35 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Justification for mailscanner.


 My company has budgeted a good amount of money for a spam/virus filtering
email gateway, similar to what I can accomplish with mailscanner. We've
tested a few commercial products, none to our satisfaction. While we are
meeting with their sales staff I typically jot down each application they
are using. It's amazing the amount of money some of these vendors are
charging for what is 99% open source software. Typically these boxes are
running redhat, postfix, sa, razor
 the list goes on. The only proprietary
software I see on these boxes are their web gui front ends, which are
typically attractive, but IMHO - useless.
Anyway, the question was put to me today - how can you justify wanting to
spend valuable man hours building and configuring our own system based on
open source, when we've already budgeted enough money to cover a commercial
solution?
While the simple answers are the ones that make sense to us technological
people 
1> open source is good. 
2> personal satisfaction of putting your own system together 
3> It's just darn cool & techo-geeky. 

I believe;

1. It's the best solution at any price.

2. It provides more features than any other commercial application. 

3. It's updated much more frequently than the commercial solutions. This is
very important in accurately detecting spam. It's a race between the
spammers and SpamAssassin and the ruleset writers. 

4. It can use multiple virus scanners of your choice at the same time. This
was very important today where a lot of folks got burned by a single virus
scanner (thank you ClamAV!). Your virus scanners are updated hourly.

I'm sure you'll get a few other responses :)


Steve
Stephen Swaney
President
Fortress Systems Ltd.
Steve.Swaney at FSL.com

Unfortunatley, those answers arent going to satisfy the higher ups. 
Anyone seen any good articles, or have any comment that may help me put
together a good answer to this? 
Thanks, 
-Jim 


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