OT: Commercial Content Filtering Products

[Mike Jakubik]

Derek Catanzaro 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.

    I am working on such a product myself. It is based on MailScanner 
and all the other popular Open Source spam software and runs of FreeBSD. 
The difference from a self made OSS product is that it is an all-in-one, 
self managed appliance. It features a web interface that lets you tweak 
most of the important MS options, as well as some extras not found in MS 
such as; Automatic user detection (for custom login to view reports, 
manage quarantine and black/white lists). Daily quarantine reports sent 
to users via email. Active Directory integration, to download local 
recipient lists and reject unknown users at the MTA level. RAID and 
hardware monitoring. Automatic updates and upgrades.

    While the product is not feature complete yet, i have a number of 
clients using it as a test, and they are all happy with it so far. Price 
wise, i am shooting for somewhere around $1700 CDN for the product, and 
$30/Month for updates. This is however a small/medium version, and is 
designed for lower loads (roughly half of what you specified). A higher 
end version will simply require better hardware, on which i can not give 
you an accurate estimate at this point (my best guess is about $800 
more). The hardware is all quality SuperMicro components, no cheap 
desktop components.

    If anyone wants more information or screenshots of the interface, 
feel free to email me in private. Also, if anyone is brave enough and 
willing, i could provide the current product for free (minus hardware 
and shipping costs) on a test and feedback basis. You can keep using the 
product when/if a final version is released, and if you are not happy 
with it for some reason, you can use the hardware for some other 
function. It is a stable product, but is not feature complete and ready 
for mass production yet.