Mathias Homann wrote:
So, has anyone here seen/touched this thing before?
Not that one, but touched two other vendors' appliances.
For me, the only strong point with it seems to be the combined
firewall/AV/spam scanner thing (waitaminute... single point of failure??),
and the web admin frontend which can generate colorful pie charts about
spam/virus statistics (which, of course, can be printed on overhead films and
used to increase the IT budget...).
Anyone ever seen one of those?
Lately they *all* look like an amavisd-new wrapper with a commercial AV,
SA- or DSPAM-based AS analysis plus all those colorful niceties that
impress managers but don't actually improve performance.
One big issue with these appliances is how they decide a content is spam
or not, and how you can adapt the appliance to your needs. Many of them
keep a sort-of centralized "rules" (Bayes? heuristic? ...) that spreads
to each appliance, so you really don't know what is behind the
decisional process. That makes it hard to explain your customer why his
favourite Ikea newsletter was blocked. Same goes for non-English spam/ham.
There might be other issues, but they're OT for this list.
SA rulez! :)
Paolo
PS: I asked one of those vendors (the one I sent an idea of pricings a
few weeks ago) how they deal with DNS-based lists. I wanted to know if
they use vendor-based DNS replicas or query public nameservers, since
they advertise +100kmsgs/day. They haven't answered yet...
