Best value anti-virus programs

[Steen, Glenn]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list 
> [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Paul Welsh
> Sent: den 17 februari 2005 23:10
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Best value anti-virus programs
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: MailScanner mailing list 
> > [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Richard Siddall
> > Sent: 17 February 2005 21:18
> > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: Re: Best value anti-virus programs
> > 
> > Is this for commercial, non-profit, personal, or educational 
> > institution
> > use?  I believe the licenses and pricing differ depending on which
> > category you fall into.
> 
> Good point. I would fall into the commercial category.
As such you'd likely have to pay "top dollar" for anything but clamav
and BitDefender (which are both free to use commercially).
Do you perhaps have some form of "site license"? That might entitel
you to use a commandline version of your commercial AV?
I'm in the gray zone between .gov/.com (in sweden)... so this might
not apply to your situation, but I do have such a license (for mcaffe)
so the "extra" uvscan for *nix is essentially ... "free":-).

> 
> > Increasingly, the AV vendors seem to be writing their 
> > licenses such that
> > you have to buy their (expensive) mail scanning version and 
> figure out
> > how many users you have according to their definition of a user
> > (assuming they actually bother to define what a user or mailbox is).
> > None of them seem to be interested in selling per-server 
> licenses for
> > file-level scanners to commercial MailScanner/Amavis/etc. users.
> 
> Yes, I too have had the problem of trying to decide how many 
> user licences I
> would need.  I have customers with a single pop account that 
> captures all
> mail for their domain.  So, presumably 1 mailbox=1 licence. 
> Of course, the
> mail server on their LAN downloads all their mail and 
> distributes it to 50
> mailboxes, so they are getting a much more inexpensive 
> solution than the
> customer with a dozen users each with their own mailbox on my 
> server, each
> of whom will need a licence.  This neglects to mention the 
> customers who
> simply use my server as a relay.  Since they have no mailboxes it's
> difficult to associate them with a licence, even though their 
> mail gets
> scanned on its way to them.
A good reason to ditch any AV that forces you to pay by using strange
and cumbersome licensing models, wouldn't you agree?
Of course one should pay a reasonable sum for the programs one uses,
but when the licensing gets strange...:-).

I'd recommend that you use at least clamav and bdc in conjunction with
a commercial AV... "Don't put all eggs in one basket" and all that;).
The extra "cost" in terms of processing is usually worth it. If you'd
just use one extra, take clam.

-- Glenn

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