Mark Martinec wrote:
"As the per-seat costs for any available commercial spamfilter solution
exceed the margin for a retail Internet service account, SpamAssassin
is the only spamfilter solution usable by ISPs"
Nothing like the truth, eh? ;-)
I'm sure we could use something like that if you believe it's accurate.
I'd need a name and company to go along with it.
There are other free solutions for spam filtering, the CRM114 and DSPAM
come to mind, so the above is probably not accurate.
Mark
We've run DSPAM for a customer's mailserver and it's a bitch to setup,
there were many little bugs in the earlier versions webinterfaces, some
of which were corrected in later versions of dspam, others you have to
correct yourself, or find patches for them that were posted to the dspam
mailing list archives. This was on FreeBSD, and if anyone wants a
copy of my notes to setting up DSPAM your welcome to them.
Personally I like it, and once it's installed it works, but it's
definitely not for the newbie admin to configure. Also, it's approach
is to force the user into taking a much more active part of configuring
their spam filtering, because dspam doesen't work at all unless the user
builds a corpus, thus the user is forced into building a corpus.
Granted the dspam interface makes this easy for the user to do - far,
far easier than Spamassassin as a matter of fact - but
the downside is that a lot of users DON'T want to be forced into doing
ANYTHING, and are contented enough with SOME spam filtering, and so that
is where the pre-built SA rulesets are a real bonus.
Our customer - which was a corporation which could enforce use of dspam
and their administrator also -liked- dspam, eventually had us take it
off their server and replace it with SA due to their employees
complaining about it.
Frankly I cannot imagine the screaming if we tried fielding DSPAM to
our own retail ISP customers. My experience with it is that DSPAM is
absolutely not usable by a retail ISP.
As for CRM114, it looks cool but I don't think it's really ready for
prime time. For starters, I cannot understand in this day and age why
anyone would write a software program that had portability issues
between 32 and 64 bit OSs. Our mailservers have all run 64-bit FreeBSD
for something like the last 3 years, now. (even the customers
mailserver we ran dspam on is a 64 bit system) I can see CRM114 useful
as a pre-filter in front of SpamAssassin, by use of crm114-milter, but
I don't think I'd trust it for production use as the main spamfilter.
Also, the requirement for it to train it's database is also a negative.
And yes, I fully understand that relying on the fixed SA rules is
not optimal, but most users don't want to expend one iota of effort to
filter spam, and they will not lift a finger to train their classifier.
Ted
