[IMail Forum] Stay or Go...

[Jason Newland]

Everyone,   I have been sitting here pondering the usefulness of IMail for a few days now.  I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the subject of abandoning Imail for another mail solution.   Here are my observations so far:  With spam being the number one concern I (and most mail admins) have, what does i-mail offer that is usefull?  Well, from where I sit, we successfully filter about 95-99% of all Spam sent to our customers (Mind you this is done with the wonderful Declude products as add ons, but could be done with the new goodies in V8)  The problem with this solution is that it isn't complete.  The effect of spam is still felt on my systems.  Our CPU cycles spent dealing with it, and our bandwidth wasted in accepting it in the first place.  From a resource point of view this is a worthless endeavor.  The only real way that IMail prevents this waste is the Kill file that blocks the message at the initial transaction level.   This brings me to my topic of switching to a better system.  After a couple of days of reading other vendors product sheets, I have came to the conclusion that IMail is WAAAAY behind in the Spam department.  It seems that most other mail solutions already offer what we have been looking for in IMail.  Such as dynamic kill files, tarpitting (for defense against dictionary attacks, mass mailers, IPV4 lookups during the SMTP transaction, Hijack prevention, and the list goes on.    I do have to say, that Yes, Imail is the 10 minute e-mail solution (or whatever their pitch is), but that is all, you have to spend thousands of dollars in extra hardware and software to achieve the same result that you get what other vendors offer out of the box.  So this leads me to believe that most IMail users continue to be users due to the fact that the TRUE costs involved with IMail only creep up on you so that you don't notice the price you pay!     Please let me know what your thoughts....       Jason