> Is there any *good* and *trustable* comparison between SA and other
> commercial solutions?
It depends on what kind of comparison you are interested in. Every few
months some magazine or online info service will run a comparison of various
spam tools, and the report of their report ends up generating a considerable
amount of traffic here. ;-)
It should be noted that many commercial spam devices actually use some
version or other of SA as the main engine; possibly with local patches from
the spam tool supplier. Thus it should be expected that the commercial tool
and SA will be reasonably equivalent in ability to prune spam from the mail.
The main difference in the commercial solutions, as best I can tell, is ease
of installation and use compared to SA. Basically, you are paying someone
to package SA (or some other spam engine) along with a usually complete mail
solution, and also usually a rule updating service.
So the commercial solution becomes somewhat of a "no brainer" to install and
administer, since it is a packaged solution, and most of the administration
is actually done by the company you bought it from.
On the other hand, SA in the raw can be a little challenging for someone new
to mail processing. There are hundreds or possibly thousands of assembling
a mail processing chain, and everyone has their favorite method. There is
no "one standard vendor-supplied way" as there is in the PC world. This
means that every new mail admin has to a) find out what the possible
solution are (no mean feat in itself), b) decide which one(s) are likely to
be best in his case, c) find all of the necessary parts for the solution, d)
install all of the parts, with their various requirements, e) get it all
working together, and f) keep it all working on each minor upgrade of any
part. This isn't trivial if being a mail admin is supposed to be a very
minor part of your main job description.
So the overall comparison boils down to: SA is free in terms of download
cost, but not free in terms of admin hours spent installing, monitoring for
upgrades, and similar (although RDJ has greatly helped in allowing somewhat
automatic rule updates). The other tools can cost a lot, but generally
require very little administration time, and generally you don't have a lot
of options in their setup. Both are usually pretty good at catching spam.
Loren
