On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <t...@ipinc.net> wrote:
> Just lost another one, dammit. Small company with about 6 mailboxes who > some consultant gave them a song and dance about how Gmail's such a > better mail service since "they don't get any spam" The trend towards email service providers for companies to host their mailboxes has been accelerating for about the past 6 to 12 months. I don't know whether there was any specific trigger (Exchange version upgrade-related, possibly?). At dnswl.org, we see a number of netranges going "stale" (ie, not being seen with live traffic any more for extended periods of time), and when we re-check we see that MX/SPF point to (largely) outlook.com or Google Mail (plus a long tail of other providers). > SpamAssassin for us filters probably about 80% of the spam out of the box, > doing nothing other than using defaults. Yes, SpamAssassin requires site- or customer-specific tuning. So does every other spamfilter. I run the domain for my family over Gmail, and while it's decent at filtering, it has a hard time coping with some of the more bizarre technical and list email I get :) > 5 pieces of mail are NOT spam, even at 99% effectiveness, the user is > STILL getting 50 pieces of spam in a day that SpamAssassin misses, > compared to their 5 pieces of ham mail. It's not only the spam. It's also the viruses, the email archive, the eDiscovery, the mobile device integration, the version upgrades, the web access, the system administration, the email reputation management, the IPv6 migration, the squeeze on the IT budget and staffing, the service level requirements, ... you name it. Messaging has become complex and is more interconnected between various channels (instant messaging, presence awareness, voice, voice conferencing, video conferencing with screen sharing...). The market for specialised, dedicated and/or access-provider-bound mail services is definitely shrinking. It's not disappearing completely anytime soon, but some providers will have a hard time to retain meaningful economies of scale and are thus likely to leave that market. SpamAssassin is still an important and useful component in an overall setup. But it needs to be embedded in a full suite (and by that I do not mean just plumbing into the MTA of choice). > What do other people do? Or are we just going to end up with an Internet in > about 10 years where every single email box is either on Microsoft 365 or > Gmail and the NSA has a wonderful interface to use to hunt through whatever > they want without bothering with a warrant? The "NSA" argument does not really influence any purchase decision - or not any more than it did in pre-Snowden times. Large european customers who have an exposure to privacy-related risks did not and do not outsource to US providers given the poor legal and regulatory protection. The wave of revelations merely served to proof an already existing sentiment. -- Matthias
