Re: Free anti-spam software (was Re: Who should run a mail server?)

[...]

In other words your very situation is way off from the vast majority
of small firms out there. Does not colide with my statements.

>>>>consumes very little of my time to administer (maybe a few minutes a
>>>week.)
>
>> Compared to zero with our box.
>
>I don't believe that; sorry. You never have to add or remove users?
>Enable or disable out-of-office replies? Create or delete aliases?
>Manage mailing lists?

Of course users have to be added etc. Question is wether this really
happens on a per week basis :-) It's a function of the number of
useres I think. Then, our WebiMail Interface to the server allows the
end users to set their own out of office replies and also perform
what's needed to create and delete aliases as you call them. The admin
can configure though wether the individual user has this functionality
or WebMail at all. Mailing lists are probably also not so comon in
SOHO envireonements even though we support this to some degree. I
think though that mailig lists would be more frequently used if the
users would know better what they do and can do.

>> Centralizing applications as it's comon these days is having the big
>> disadvantage that if you need to bring the server down - due to
>> whatever reasons
>
>Our colocated server has been up continuously for 416 days; it's our
>MX host. Our back-end mail server has been up continuously for only 9
>days because we had to move it, but prior to that it had been up for about
>8 months. We've not had any problems with centralizing applications.

In your scenario where you maintain all by yourself I asume you also
have the overview - i.e. have every thing really under controll. SOHO
envieronements often see a couple of software suppliers etc. There
managing maintenance sometimes becomes a daunting task with users
suffering from downtimes. I do not say though that this is the very
most important and absolut killer criteria. It's just clear that
avoiding this problem is an advantage.

>> Not so with our aproach. With a decentralized box
>> aproach you also spread the risk acordingly.
>
>You also can't do some interesting things we require our mail server to do.
>Can your box:
>
>- Manage mailing lists with as much flexibility as mailman?
It can manage mailing lists - I don't know mailman in detail enough to
answer this part. I can say though that it's easy.

>- Look for special e-mails going to special recipients, and upon finding them,
> GPG-decrypt them, check some fields in the e-mail against a SQL database,
> and perform certain actions, all during the SMTP transaction? Because
> we need that capability.

I agree that this is very special. However, if this is an interaction
with a different application forewarding to said app mail might be an
option.

>- Forward mail to certain addresses, but *only* between 5pm and 9pm
> on weekdays, or all day on weekends?

Of course forewarding is possible. To add a time schedule to it would
not be difficult if we see the need. We have something like this in
mind with regard to e-Mail push to mobile devices.

>- Forward mail to certain addresses to different people, where the person
> who gets the forwarded e-mail is chosen based on the date. (eg, on
> one day, Bob gets the support e-mail, but the next day, Jane gets it.)

Nice idea. So far non of our customers had such a requierement. It
probably depends on the kind of business.

>All of the above are things we do in our business, and are absolute
>requirements. And we want them all automated; no manual tuning of
>forwarding settings or the like.

I also could list stuff your server can't do at this point in time
(i.e. perform e-Mail push to mobile devices, hold thousands of socket
connections logically open (frozen on the massstoreage) while not
having a single byte of ram allocated for them nor any task or
process) to just name one thing. No solution is a one fit's it all
thing - we do not claim this. We are more than happy if our solution
fits a broad range of situations which we think it does.

>> In fact embedded applications is surely an aproach which will replace
>> many if not most traditional server setups in the future.
>
>Yes, in many cases, but not when you need crazy flexibility. Look,
>one of our products *is* a plug-and-play spam-filtering appliance.
>You plug it in, 5 minutes of setup, and you're up and running.
>However, we differentiate ourselves from the "average" appliance
>builder by (a) not hiding the fact that we're running Linux -- let's
>face it, almost all appliances out there run Linux or FreeBSD,

I fully agree that I haven't seen any other competitor which would not
base their product on linux as you mention. However, our box does NOT
run any flavour of linux. The firmware was completely written from
scratch. We actually designed the hard and software so as we CAN
exclude stack overruns and buffer overrun exploits and the like. We
think that this kind of security is very important.

>(b)
>supplying the source code to everything (including our proprietary
>bits), and (c) allowing end-users to modify the software. 95% of our
>customers don't care. 5% of them really appreciate the approach, and
>have done amazing things with our products.

Yes, there is always a market for very specialized products.

[...]

>Providing the appliances are open, I would find them appealing. A
>sealed closed-source box is a step backwards to me, and I would never
>allow such a thing in my company. As you say, e-mail is critical -- far
>too critical to host on a box that doesn't give me complete flexibility,
>complete control, and complete source code.

Hmmm, I hope you do then not use any cisco switch or router (or other
brand thereof). I know that this functionality can be constructed
using linux boxes, but I find it quite impractical in case of a
switch. :-)

>Before you reply, please remember: I'm only saying that your box would
>not fit well in MY situation. It probably would fit well in many other
>situations, especially SOHO settings.

As mentioned earlier David - no ofense. I apreciated the discurse.

Markus
.

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