Justification for mailscanner.

[Samuel Luxford-Watts]

Well,  in the case of mailscanner there is no real reason to pay through the
nose for any other product (IMHO!), unless of course you do not like the way
mailscanner works for some reason.

Main reasons for choosing opensource in addition to those below:

No lock-in contracts
No forced upgrade
Large support community

The only reason I can see for choosing a commercial product is if you need
maintenance contracts - I am sure Julian or perhaps others here would be
more than happy to provide such commercial support.

As far as man hours setup and administering Mailscanner goes - If you have
linux skills already then its no more effort than installing a commercial
product. If you do not have linux skills then it will take some time to get
used to and I would advise you do spend some of that money reserved for this
project to get an expert to install it for you.

Perhaps you need to persuade the 'higher ups' that more money does not
always equate to more quality. It also helps if you give them the ballenced
picture for each solution. ie. factor in man hours for implementation,
projected administration and maintenance and training. Opensource is by no
means free.

>From personal experience working with both Mailscanner and one of the main
commercial mailsweeping (hint) products I would choose Mailscanner every
time - even tho it has no built in graphical interface it has been easier to
administer and just doesnt go wrong (unless I have done something stupid)

Hope this helps in your decision making....

Sam


P.S. What really sold it to me was when our Mailscanner server blew up
(almost literally). It took a whole 30 minutes to setup another server. 20
minutes of that was installing SuSE!

-----Original Message-----
From: Randal, Phil [mailto:prandal at HEREFORDSHIRE.GOV.UK]
Sent: 02 March 2004 09:57
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Justification for mailscanner.


Free upgrades for ever.

Free technical support, second to none.

Full access to the source, so you can cuatomise it to your own needs, if
ever you should want to.

Phil

---------------------------------------------
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK]On Behalf
Of Limmer, Jim
Sent: 01 March 2004 21:35
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.

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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