> I don't however believe that the intentions were to snipe customers > away from Declude,
No? Not to get some people out of the Declude upgrade path, so they could spend their limited budgets elsewhere? Not to upsell a gateway solution that "takes the heat off" a Declude infrastructure? The history here speaks for itself. Solid Oak decided to get out of the Declude add-on business, forcing CyberSitter users to either put in the Alligate MTA in place of IMail/Declude or stop using CyberSitter's very effective ruleset. It was a bully move, smart capitalism but a pretty dumb way of expressing selflessness. I have no doubt that the new product is an excellent MTA; that does not make competitive spamming okay. > but instead to provide a value-added solution to those of us that > require an address-validating gateway or pre-scanner of some sort. What does that even mean? Please: tell me what product that causes the consumer to incur costs above their baseline is not marketed as a "value-added solution." Of course it has to be claimed to add value; otherwise, no one would pay for it. That's a basic building block of software commerce. It is not a building block of good-heartedness. Do you want a free address-validating gateway that isn't limited to 10 connections? Use 5XXSINK and MS SMTP, for God's sake. Use Mercury/32. Use MailEnable. > His company has of course previously offered a plug-in for Declude, > and publishes a blacklist that many around here are making use of as > well. That they once offered CyberSitter is material because of the *bad* feelings it left behind (see John's e-mail). It doesn't entitle anyone to come back, _still_ without a Declude add-on or integration, and market another product. If offering an well-regarded DNSBL allows you circumvent the rules of spamming, that's quite a surprise. Can the people who run other respected blacklists just pop on an anti-spam vendor support list and sell competitive -- or at the very least non-vendor-aware -- products? News to me. And I doubt you really support that position, once extended. > I don't believe that they are looking at this product as a big money > maker for them Any money is big money when you get it unethically. > or even a money maker at all. This is a slimmed-down version of a product they already built and are/were compensated for. If they failed to break even when they first put out the product, is it up to us to bail them out in this round? I might feel less inclined to rant on if they weren't a comfortably profitable and well-known software vendor, by Brian's own admission, with CyberSitter. They have the time and money in the bank. They aren't trying to pay past-due bills with this thing; they are trying to recoup some labor investment. So far, that's all both common and necessary in business, and not objectionable in its own right. But where it goes dead wrong is spamming this list, or any competitor's list. I don't care if you only stand to make the equivalent of 5 bucks an hour for the development time you put into the product vs. the number of copies you'll sell. You still need to figure standard marketing, not spamming, into your budget. > Even programs like Sniffer has some potential of competing with > Declude, though both are of course stronger as a result of working > together. Sniffer is a legitimate plug-in for Declude. Pete never markets Assert on this list; if people discover it from getting into the Sniffer community through Declude, that's good viral work by ARM. It's the opposite tactic than that used by Solid Oak, in that ARM can use a Declude-aware product as an entry point into their own mailing lists and other products, some of them even competitive. But Sniffer for Declude is not handicapped vs. the Sniffer part of Assert, showing their good-faith maintenance of different integrations. It's not the same thing at all. > It would be good for Declude to offer a gateway solution of some > sort or find a partner to do so. Isn't SmarterMail that partner? IMO, we need another MTA, and Computerized Horizons distracted by such work, like a hole in the head. --Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SpamAssassin plugs into Declude! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/SPAMC32/download/release/ Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Exchange or IMail mailboxes into IMail Aliases! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/exchange2aliases/download/release/ http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/download/release/ --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude EVA www.declude.com] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
