The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Flack Maguire <address@concealed>]

Hi Chris,

 

I am just following the Sympa listserve at this time and have no indepth knowledge on Sympa at all (hope to some day).  However, I can speak smartly about outsourcing the spam filter portion.  I have just finished vetting this space for a solution for one of my clients.  What I found was basically three tier 1 spam filter services.

 

They are:

MessageLabs ( http://www.messagelabs.com/ )

MX Logic ( http://www.mxlogic.com/ )

Postini

 

Note that Postini was recently acquired by Google and now offers their service at a highly affordable price.  You can see that at this link:

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/index.html

 

 

Although Postini is so well priced now, I suspect that you can not go that wrong with any of these three.  I will know a whole lot more in the next year as we test all three platforms.  I have nothing hard to place this on, but my gut feeling after talking to  reps at all three companies was that MX Logic would likely be the most flexible in tweaking to your needs in case something special arose in using their service in combination with Sympa.  The contact at MessageLabs seemed very upfront about their strengths.  He felt that MX Logic led them some in their user interface tools but that there underlying filtering technology was a couple of steps ahead of the other tier 1 players and far ahead of the tier 2 players.  With all that said, I will be the first to say that teasing out hard truth from sales pitch can certainly be challenging at times.

 

There are a number of tier 2 players as well as companies that are taking some of the hardware solutions (Barracuda, IronPort, etc.) and offering an outsourced solution based on that hardware.  I typically always take my clients to the best choice in the tier 2 because I find that the huge gains in access to the company and their flexibility typically outweigh the advantages that the tier 1 players have in a larger feature set, etc.

 

But, when it comes to spam filtering, I found myself concluding that it really comes down to the companies with the largest scale that have the best advantage.  Even more specifically, I would bet that it really boils down to the company that can afford the best math and linguistic experts for fighting spam.

 

I hope that helps.

 

Cheers,

Flack

 

 

 

>>Has anyone done this?

>>We have just put in a Proofpoint cluster in front of our mail cluster
>>(CommuniGate Pro).  Currently I am using MIMEDefang and SpamAssassin on my
>>Sympa server to score SPAM message and the SpamHause XBL with Sendmail to
>>reject senders.  I want to get out of the SPAM filtering (and AntiVirus
>>scanning) if possible.  That would reduce the number of applications that I
>>have to manage and update on the listserv.

>>---
>> Chris Andrews
>> Boston College
>> Collaboration Team
>> 617-552-6365