I thought I'd re-post what I had originally sent to them as a rebuttal (and that they then deleted). There might have been a small error or two in the first part, but, here goes:
GWAVA vs Spam Assassin There's some things wrong with your assertions about spam assassin: 1) only 2 of the contributors to spam assassin are at NAI. The others are not affiliated with NAI and/or Deersoft. Nor have they expressed that they're leaving the SA team. 2) there's still lots of talented people working on Spam Assassin, and a few of them were insulted by your assertion (but took it in stride as typical sales/marketing BS ... we techies all know to ignore sales and marketing people, they never know what they're talking about). 3) Spam Assassin is currently rolling out a new version with several new features, including bayesian learning. That combined with the fact that you can write your own rules NOW (not later when GWAVA comes out with a rule builder), means that even if the SA team takes a little while longer to release newer and newer versions, you can still adapt it to your own evolving spam situation. 4) they're already working on the next version of spam assassin 5) performance? My dual p3-7xxMHz linux box with less than a gig of RAM, running MailScanner (which is a wrapper around Sophos SAVI anti-virus (or many other virus scanners), Spam Assassin, RBL checks, attachment name rules, AND gives you options for how to handle results from each of those) barely even notices a flow of 160,000 messages per day. That's also my workstation, running the bloaded hog Star Office, X windows, a web browser, as well as a local IMAP server and a few other administrative functions that I fire off from my machine. And I toot that horn as someone who doesn't even really like linux (I'm more of a FreeBSD person). Though, if you try implimenting it on Solaris/sparc, you'll need more horsepower ... solaris has some better reliability and scalability features over linux, but it's slow. Btw: mailscanner is free and open also. 6) what makes you think a potential spammer wont buy GWAVA and then offer their spammer peers the use of their GWAVA engine as a test system? There are in fact people selling such services to spammers already (though, I don't know if any of them are using GWAVA). The point is, if GWAVA becomes significant, then the spammers will start using it as a test engine for sending their spam too. This is, by far, not a criticism you can solely point at Spam Assassin. If GWAVA becomes a hurdle for them, then it will become worth their pennies to pay someone to offer this as a service, and thus it will become worth THAT person's money to also buy GWAVA and start using it to make sure spam avoids GWAVA's protections. 7) you don't think security and cheap go to together? Can you say "kerberos"? what about "ssh"? maybe "openssl"? how about "openbsd"? Maybe you should research this claim a little better. In addition to running a 25,000 user mail system for a university, I am also the owner of the most generic DNS domain and email address on the internet (user at domain dot org). I protect myself from spam using the same setup I use at work. I have fewer than 5 spam messages per day since I set that up ... I used to get hundreds. Most days, I don't see ANY spam messages. Tell me again why I should pay for Groupwise and GWAVA Heuristics? The ONLY one of your assertions that holds _ANY_ water is support. It's true, I can't call anyone to offload my support issues to, so I have to be my own expert. But, I have never found the SA-talk mailing list to be lacking as a support channel, nor have I ever had any problems using SA. Not even a little. It's one of the most painless pieces of software I've ever dealt with. A 24/7 dedicated support channel would be a nice warm fuzzy, but it's not worth dropping any major money upon when you look at how little trouble the software systems in question actually are. Now, if you're already a Groupwise user, and you have no desire to have to be your own local expert (for a very easy system) on a new system, then certainly use GWAVA Heuristics. But don't do it because of the claims being made here. They're just flat out wrong. Instead, do it because it's the solution that best fits your existing environment, budget, and skill sets. If you were already considering Spam Assassin, and determined that it fits your existing environment, budget, and skill sets ... don't believe the FUD here. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
