MailScanner ANNOUNCE: New commercial product SMGateway

[John Rudd]

On Mar 2, 2005, at 6:29 AM, Julian Field wrote:

> We are pleased to announce SMGateway, the first Secure Mail Gateway
> product from Fortress Systems Ltd.

- Active Directory Authentication?  What about Kerberos?  (POP/IMAP is
good enough for us (since those check against our Kerberos pass
phrases), but I'm curious if you're doing AD via LDAP, or AD via
Kerberos, or some other aspect of AD authentication I'm not aware of
... and if you're doing it via AD's LDAP functionality, I wonder why
you didn't also list LDAP authentication in the blurb)

- Redhat only?  No Solaris support?  Any Solaris support planned?

- Also, we use an array of machines to do our mailscanner work right
now.  Does SMGateway support this (Ie. users only have to set their
options on one machine, instead of having to touch all 4 of them?).  My
impression is that because you're using MailWatch, which I thought uses
mysql for various things, then it might be possible to put the mysql
database on a separate machine, and thus have multiple work-horse
machines that all use 1 configuration database.  Is that an
appropriate/accurate assumption?

- When you say 1 year of updates, what do you mean exactly?  (I mean,
if it's free to download, does that mean I could install the new
versions by hand for free, but you have some stream lined auto-update
engine that costs money to keep feeding it?  or is there some other
aspect of updates that's not clearly being presented here? or what?)
(don't get me wrong, the compelling part of the prices is the support
contracts, and if we were to go down the SMGateway path, we would be
getting a support contract regardless of what the updates part means
... but I'm curious what that part of the contract _actually_ means,
considering the download is free)

Since I've asked those other questions, I might as well ask these:

- instead of email forwarding being user configured, can the
administrator(s) turn it off and make it completely unavailable to the
end user?  We have other methods for setting up user forwards, and
those need to remain our authoritative mechanisms.

- does it allow per-user bayes databases?

- does it allow bayes databases to be completely disabled?

- it talks about mailwatch doing quarantine management; does MailWatch
get upset if you turn off quarantining completely?

- I recently wrote a script that reads through the sendmail and
mailscanner syslogs and extracts data about each virus (relay that sent
it, mail queue ID, viruses that were in the message, claimed SMTP
Mail-From, date and time of the message) and mails $relay at abuse.net
with a report about each infected message that relay sent us (1 stanza
per message) ... I seem to recall that one of the things that MailWatch
does with mysql is logging to mysql; can I still have it also do
logging to syslog, so I don't have to re-write my nightly report?


(we're actually evaluating vendor supported alternatives to
MailScanner* right now ... including things like Sophos Pure Message
and Ironport, etc.  So, it's very interesting to me that this product
would come out right as we're doing that, it might allow us to put
MailScanner into our list of products; but Solaris and Clustering are
on our requirements list (as "must") ... Linux and FreeBSD are just on
our "should" list; if Solaris and Clustering are there, I could easily
add this to our list of products to evaluate)

(* I'm not unsatisfied with mailscanner, it's just that we have a
larger set of interests and requirements that are being evaluated, and
we would have to "roll our own" to just use mailscanner in that new
picture ... which we would rather not do, so we're looking at our
alternatives; a lot of what we're looking for, though, is on the list
of SMGateway's features)

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