On 7/28/2014 10:42 AM, Matthias Leisi wrote:
On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt<[email protected]> 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?).
The specific trigger is in 2012 Microsoft announced SBS would be
terminated. (SBS 2011) is the last.
For a company to field exchange 2012 server for 5 people is about $20K.
That is licensing, server hardware and expertise to put it together.
Our "other" consultancy is a windows shop and we can roll these if
anyone wants them.
When SBS 2011 shipped you could do Exchange for 5 users for around $5K
for the licensing and hardware and expertise.
I'm not going to go into the technical changes Microsoft made in the
new version of Exchange that tripled the costs, just trust me they are
there.
A couple years ago we sold around 6 exchange servers a year. Once
MS "graduated" everyone to the new version of exchange, we haven't
sold any. Sold SB Essentials but that's not Exchange.
We also have some large companies and all of them are holding to
exchange 2008 R2 for the same reasons.
Microsoft is on service pack 3 rollup 7 on exchange 2008 R2. It is
very much a trainwreck in the making for the large site licensees of
Exchange and Microsoft. In fact we already rolled a complete drop-in
Exchange replacement using Horde/IMP for one customer with about 100
employees who didn't want to upgrade from exchange 2003. We expect
to do more of these.
Microsoft will win in the end with upgrades to exchange server but it
simply isn't going to make economic sense for anyone with 200 employees
or lower. So they will win but it will be Pyrrhic since a chunk will
bail completely and go to Linux.
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.
Ah, no. Everything other than the spam can be handled by OSS.
But, spam is bad because the users bring it down on themselves by their
own behavior.
These are employees who go online and fill their work email address out
on the online "win an ipod" fake contest websites. Because they know if
they use their private address it will get spammed and they will have to
do something about it. But hey they can use work email and it's someone
elses problem to fix. Then bitch to their bosses that they are getting
so much spam. Their bosses bitch to us because it doesn't even enter
their mind that their employees would be wasting time on their break
doing this crap online.
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).
The specifics is spam. Users believe administrators can just flick a
switch and turn it off. Billions is wasted every year on scanning
software that the vendors claim will "just turn it off" because the
buyers actually believe that switch exists. Nothing you have said
addresses this.
You are droning on and on all of the sound bites people use to sell
Cloud. Fine. Great. I know that. I'm Cloud. Gmail is Cloud. 365 is
Cloud. We are all Cloud. Now, please get back to the real issue which
is how to fight against perception based on false assumptions.
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.
Oh brother. Why can't you simply accept my cheap shot for the joke that
it is and drop it instead of trying to turn it into "Euros are better
than you are, naynner naynner naynner"
Ted
-- Matthias
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