OK, Ipswitch is hauling in the big bucks for Imail 6 upgrades and is
otherwise idle, vbg, so I think it's time we hit 'em with a NEW PRODUCT
REQUEST!!
Imail's filtering rules are fine and go a good way towards an anti-spam
solution. The capability to have rules at mail host and user accounts
level is excellent, allowing tailoring of spam defenses quite nicely, and
is bad, because the rules have to be distributed to each mail host's
directory manually (although $20 will get you a nice tool to automate rule
file distribution).
As we all experience increasing levels of mail, spam, attachments, virii, I
suspect most of us would like to isolate Imail to dedicated machines. For
example, NOT mix Imail with very heavy attachment/virus scanning on the
same machine, certainly given the price of recently out-classed PC's. I'm
thinking about ISP's trying to add as much value and services
differentiation as possible to their shops, like virus scanning and spam
filtering.
Likewise, I think a front-end machine for spam-filtering for one or most
Imail hosts would the way to go. (Lyris has MailShield.com for this very
niche, but it's $5000 lifetime license per machine, after an initial price
of $1000).
It appears to me that all the elbows, tees, pipes, etc in Imail's
relaying/forwarding and mail filtering functions are sufficient to be
reconfigured into a MailShield type of product, but hopefully for less that
$5000.
ie, an "Imail Shield" product (if that doesn't get Ipswitch into a
trademark dilution pb) would have no local hosts, but function only as a
forwarder, with incoming mail would be subjected to Imail's filtering
rules. The mail arrives, gets filtered, and the forwarded to the Imail
machine(s) where the mail hosts are.
There would be two levels of filtering: 'global filtering' applying to all
Imail Shield mail hosts, an 'mail host filtering' applied to, er, well, you
know.
DNS MX records would all point at the Imail Shield machine. The Imail
Shield's hosts file would specifiy the destination SMTP hosts.
That's the Big Picture. Comments?
Len
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