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<TITLE>Justification for mailscanner.</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> 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.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">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?</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">While the simple answers are the ones that make sense to us technological people</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">1> open source is good.</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">2> personal satisfaction of putting your own system together</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">3> It's just darn cool & techo-geeky.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Unfortunatley, those answers arent going to satisfy the higher ups.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Anyone seen any good articles, or have any comment that may help me put together a good answer to this?</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Thanks,</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">-Jim</FONT>
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