Consider 'freeware' as components included in commercial products. Both Exchange and Zimbra do a sufficient job such that the ROI on an additional service is not that great even at that price.
I would *consider* a Google solution if they paid me $3/year/user. -----Original Message----- From: William Lefkovics [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 1:00 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Why not? For $3/year per user (hence $0.25/month) it doesn't get you much. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/compare.html I have 3 ISPs that offer the same type of message filtering inclusive of hosting agreement. I disable all filtering for each one. I'll stick with open source/freeware. -----Original Message----- From: Jason Gurtz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 2:26 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Why not? > I’m really interested in knowing why most folks (that aren’t using in- > house AS/AV solutions) haven’t moved to Google/Postini for your AS/AV? > > > > At 0.25 USD per month per address, it’s almost an order of magnitude > cheaper than any other enterprise solution available. A short time before the acquisition we looked at Postini (basically the best of breed managed provider) as well as in-house appliances. We did not consider host-based solutions. As the astute will notice, we went with an appliance. At a quarter USD per user, they have dropped their cost by nearly 50% since we were quoted. At this new cost they are nearly a fifth of what we pay in ongoing support costs for our appliance. I'm not sure what this $.25 comes with, but ours is not only anti-spam, but also licenses 3rd party AV as well as Virus outbreak filters so the cost differential may not be so bad. Why are we willing to pay so much more? Mostly for a variety of technical reasons (loss of control, ease of troubleshooting, some outscatter concerns). The one major non-technical reason is that of reputation. We checked with a number of existing customers of our appliance and they were not only unanimously supportive, but nearly all of them were close to ecstatic about how easy it was to manage and the device's performance in terms of % FP/FN. I can corroborate that; we see *no* spam in our inboxes and FP has been extremely minimal and fixable. It's almost surreal. Postini can't match that. I belong to a mailing list that's behind Postini and it gets spam. FWIW, my opinion of Postini has not changed since the Google acquisition; they are the only hosted AS/AV gateway I would recommend anyone. I think some of the "monitoring" worries are a little overblown unless shops are under HIPPA/SOX. I still consider them best of breed, but nonetheless ultimately useful only for smaller shops and/or shops with little in-house SMTP technical ability. The HIPPA/SOX shops are too big for a hosted service anyway. What would be excellent is if Google would start filtering their *outbound* Gmail through Postini... They are the current 419er spam-haven. Or, they could simply list the originating IP in the headers like every other freemail provider does. Do no evil my ass. ~JasonG -- ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~