nanog mailing list archives

Re: Openwave Opinions


From: "Rubens Kuhl Jr." <rubens () email com>
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2003 22:51:29 -0200



Every mail product that costs lots of money will yield a worse overall
solution that using a good free/open-source mail software (postfix,
qmail,
exim... pick one) and spending money on people with good technical
skills to
tune and adapt the system. Unless, of course, your financial resources
are
unlimited...

It is not just financial resources - it is also a factor of time to
build a filter / set of filters from scratch (even with spamassasin +
bogofilter you need to train it extensively, and tweak its rulesets to
suit your mail flow).

I think this part of question was referring only to MTAs, not MTA +
anti-spam/virus tools. Anti-spam tuning is really a bit slower to do than
general performance tuning (MTA or MTA + anti-virus), but this will be true
to whatever MTA software and anti-spam one might buy.


Sometimes outsourcing corporate / isp mail handling to a provider like
us, criticalpath, postini etc might be a good way to go.

Outsourcing is usually a good way to get a solution with expertise instead
of a next->next->finish software installation and license to use it... but
for ISP use, integration with internal OSS (billing, tech-support etc.)
seems to be a challenge. Outsourcing costs also keeps most ISPs from using
such a solution, unless time-to-market is the one and only criteria.


Rubens








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