Recommendation for "antivirus" software (MTA is qmail)

[Andy Dills]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Troy Settle wrote:

>
> Andy,
>
> I take exception to your statements.  I fit neither under A nor B.
>
> I figured it like this...  I could spend $35k/year + to hire a postmaster to
> keep up the spam/virus battle on our mail server, or I could pay Postini
> less than $10k/year to do the same.
>
> I have not the time myself to do this, and $25k/year or more is more than
> enough reason to go with a commercial solution for spam/virus filtering.
>
> In addition, Postini catches MUCH more spam than any open source solution I
> had previously looked at.  It's not perfect by any means, but more effective
> than anything I've seen in the open source arena.

Troy,

I respect you a lot. I didn't mean to imply as much as my words did.

I beg you, please read http://www.flakshack.com/anti-spam/

Even if you don't use OpenBSD, the rest is the same. You'll find, once you
try out amavisd-new with spamassassin and clamav (which includes
freshclam, an auto-update daemon...they had published the updates for the
latest worm within hours), that you'll strongly reconsider postini.

You won't need to pay a postmaster. I know you're more than competent
enough to implement this. The thing about spamassassin is, people won't
complain. It's amazingly accuracte (99% for me), and amavisd makes
applying per-user preferences a snap.

You may need to move to a distributed mail environment if you aren't
already, but the price of a couple of servers quickly pays for itself.

And trust me, it's very hands off. People rarely have problems with it,
and if they do, they have personal sender whitelists (which hopefully you
would implement an interface to in your online account management).

I'm not talking about taking on $35k/year for a postmaster.

I'm talking about going to a $0/year spam expense (beyond bandwidth).

I'm talking about eliminating the spam and virus problem simply by
throwing hardware at spamassassin/clamav. Ridiculously powerful servers
are available for amazing prices.

And with the secondary market the way it is...you could spend $10k, get a
used Netapp (F740), a Foundry L4 loadbalancing switch (search for
'serveriron' on ebay), and 4 new (scsi) mail servers.

$10k one time expense, and you could efficiently scan over ten
million messages per day. How much do you pay Postini?

And I promise you that you will be amazed at how it performs.

Andy

---
Andy Dills
Xecunet, Inc.
www.xecu.net
301-682-9972
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