Justification for mailscanner.

[John Rudd]

> "Limmer, Jim" wrote:
>
>  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.
>

1) With the open source solution, you likely will have exactly the
system you need instead of something that is dictated to you by the
commercial vendor (this is espeically true with the 2nd item I'm about
to mention, but even without that, you are always able to tailor the
code to your needs, where with non-open solutions you are often
prevented from going down that path).

2) MailScanner's developer is very attentive to the needs of his user
community, is up front about what features he will or wont add, and has
even changed his mind through discussion with his users about features.
I have yet to meet a commercial vendor that does any of those things.

3) by using Open Source software, you're not locked into the whims or
economic ups and downs of a commercial vendor.  If the developer decides
to change directions, abandon the project, etc. you're bascially in the
cold with the non-open source solution.  With open source, you and the
community can pick up where the developer left off.

4) With the specifics you've mentioned, they're basically charging you
money for a pretty (and useless) gui as a front end to tools you can
otherwise get for free.  I would counter with the question "how can you
justify paying for their product when the same or better is free?"

5) with Mailscanner specifically, you're not locked into specific
platforms (both on the hardware and software fronts).  If, for whatever
reason, your IT staff decides that it is time to change platforms, you
can do so without significant changes in your service offering.  These
days, it's harder and harder to find vendors that support identical
software on mulitple platforms.  Don't let vendors dictate your
hardware, OS, and MTA choices to you.