Re: [IMail Forum] Stay or Go...

[Jason Newland]

I will put together a list of vendors that, by their words, offer much greater functionality in Spam controls than IMail8 does.  And on the Postini front, we used them for a spell, but using them as a front end didn't stop the Dictionary attacks at all, and further, they rendered all of our logs-IP Blocks useless (since all incomming SMTP connections came from their IP ranges).     Jason   ----- Original Message ----- From: William Lefkovics To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 3:52 PM Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Stay or Go... I haven't read the other replies yet, but...   Not too many mail servers offer as much anti-spam functionality as IMail8.  Most depend on 3rd party applications to facilitate that process.  Including the big boys.   It sounds like you are a good candidate for outsourcing, though. www.postini.com for example. Or www.bigfish.com   William Lefkovics from TechEd   ----- Original Message ----- From: Jason Newland To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 9:56 AM Subject: [IMail Forum] Stay or Go... 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