Hi
well I used MimeSweeper/Sophos about 18 months and dropped it in favour of SA/MailScanner/Sophos/ClamAV/mailWatch.
why?
1. was using 4.2 and the upgrade to 4.3 was - uninstall and reinstall, given i have lots of custom policies (rules) this was not an option. The upgrade option wasn't very good and 50% of the time barfed (according to the user group).
2. Huge performance gain in moving. My MIMESweeper ran on a dual PIII 933MHz with 512MB ram and RAID 1 SCSI disks. took around 30 seconds per email to process. My 600mhz /512MB/IDE replace took around 5 seconds to process the email with more checks.
3. Lots of missed spam and (worse) lots of false positives. Was taking me most of day to release FP's. With the SA/MailScanner setup I hardly ever get any FP's, and those that are tend to have scores from 5-10 so the just get tagged and delivered anyway. I drop all spam with score > 10.
4. poor/slow remote admin (see 3!)
4. 4.3 was supposed to be better (quicker) and have better spam trap, but see 1, and 5 is supposed to be even better than 4.3.
5. Slow to fix issues (lots of people reported problems with the system hanging (version 4.2) and requiring constant restarts, this took over 6 months to fix)
5. Version 5 may be better, but looking the forum a while ago there is still plenty of room for improvement in the anti-spam system.
6. Alot of the anti-spam i was using was using third party (user written) ehancements as the supplied stuff wasn't very good.
Yes it took me around 6 months on and off to get SA working well (SARE rules etc). But the result is much better than I ever got from MimeSweeper, even after 3 years!
I may have hit MimeSweeper at a bad time as it went through 3 different owners and ClearSwift may be doing a better job now they've had it for a couple of years.
may I suggest your customer
a) writes a set of requirements as to what the system should do!
b) plays with both systems and see how well they match the requirements.
c) registers on the MimEsweeper forum and has a look at the continued issues with the product.
-- Martin Hepworth Snr Systems Administrator Solid State Logic Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300
Violaine Grimly wrote:
Hello,
One of our customers is (at last !) thinking about using some anti-spam tool. He got a presentation of MIMESweeper from some marketroid, which did a very convincing "trust me if it's expensive it's because it's good" job :-)
I googled a bit, but did not find any comparison between SA and MIMESweeper. Do any of you have any experience (good or bad) with MIMESweeper, can it really compare to SA ?
Tia, -- VG
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