OT: Commercial Content Filtering Products

[Glenn Steen]

On 06/11/06, Derek Catanzaro <derek at adcatanzaro.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to get an idea of the cost on commercial products that will
> basically do what MailScanner is doing for free.  The reason is because
> some vp's would like to know the cost of the commercial products.
> Ultimately I think MailScanner does a great job with the proper configs
> and I would be willing to bet that it does a lot better job than a lot
> of the commercial products you have to pay for.  Does anyone out there
> have any product names and annual costs they can provide?  I've got
> roughly 3,000 mail users and we are getting about 100,000 emails per day.
>
IMO, the competition is a dime-a-dozen... And you get what you pay for:-).
Seriously though:
- Every AV company has their own product and/or appliance. These
generally have the basic "flaw" that they only support one AV-scanner.
Most have thrown in a more or less recognizable SpamAssassin too...
But usually without more than the most basic "knobs" to turn.
- There is a "healthy" market for this type of appliance (everything
from firewall makers like WatchGuard and Fortinet to more specialized
companies). Generally speaking, most of these appliances didn't start
life as AV or spam-fighting tools, and as such aren't particularly
good at it.
- (Just to contradict my flippant first remark:-) Generally speaking,
they're usually rather steeply priced. Compare that to the
effectiveness (usually not that great), and you have ... an easy
answer:-).

If one wants to buy MailScanner (management often wants to put a
pricetag on things like support:-), then DefenderMX is the thing
(http://www.fsl.com). Last I looked (quite some time ago:-) it had
some really nice featires (AD integration etc) that (although possible
to achieve, to some extent) isn't part of a standard
MailScanner/MailWatch combo.

Since MailScanner is such a nice and configurable "product", I often
find it hard to make real comparisions with commercial gear though.
Most come off as toy cars compared to a LandCruiser;-).

-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
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