Comments on: Home Grown / Open Source vs Appliances

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:47:45 +0000

In regards to email filtering, the problem comes into the scale of management. If you want to look at open source options you have to include several pieces, upwards of ten or more. When you start getting to a scale of 2+ million attempted email connections a day and then have to trouble shoot those connections for any one of the thousands of customers, your trouble just increased by 10 fold when including all the open source tools. If you can get an appliance that you know has a good name behind it and the company is offering to spend the money for the appliance to provide a better experience to the end user I don’t see the debate. Open source works great in some places but for spam filtering there isn’t a complete package yet. Sure there are products like Zimbra, but even their mail filtering is gimped and who wants a whole cake when you already have one and just need a piece. If someone know of an open source product that has complete management with tracking facilities that can be handed off to other departments with hardware guarantees and a decent support contract offering please let me know.

@Phil I don’t know what vendors you are looking at, but if you don’t have trust in them then I don’t think your looking hard enough nor would you make the right decision. When you look for a vendor to supply you with a product one of the first things you should look for is if the vendor can deliver. Do your homework first and ask others what they think. I don’t think outsourcing the whole piece is good either. Especially when you tell your customers that you are providing the service, it just looks unprofessional. I do though think that it is ok to split different pieces of the mail into maybe an appliance to handle filtering and maybe another one to handle storage.

By: Phil Hollenback

Phil Hollenback — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:06:11 +0000

I have to come down on the side of homegrown, just because you know your level of competency but you don’t know if a vendor is really going to deliver or not. I have been burned so many times by vendors promising and then failing to deliver. If I don’t produce results then I know who to blame.

There are exceptions to this, for example it very well might make sense to use a spam filtering appliance as in the first comment. However I would never outsource my entire email infrastructure to a company like google. Something like that is just too valuable to trust to a third party.

By: Logan

Logan — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:55:46 +0000

I’ve been on both sides of this argument at different times in my career. Sorry, but your friend has it right.

I spent years as the email admin at a small ISP using open source tools, including Spam Assassin. Those responsibilities took about 4 hrs a day on average, maintaining rules, tweaking access lists, and attempting to develop scripts to automate updates.

When that ISP closed, my next job was in a company that had one of the more effective anti-spam appliances installed. It was a revelation. For a few thousand dollars per year, it just worked. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what I could cobble together on my own. … and it take near zero maintenance time by our personnel.

Someone has to keep up with endless cycle of spam fighting. It’s much cheaper to pay someone else to do it so you can spend your time on higher priority projects.