Greetings,
We have been using an Ironport Spam appliance for about 6 years now. It does really well for us however, it is not cheap to maintain. It's almost, but not quite, the salary of a full time admin. Due to budget concerns here in Illinois, we are being asked to review just about every piece of technology we use to see if we can do the same thing with another product for less money. So...do any Zimbra admins here have any opinions about this?
Basic Statistics:
- Approximately 40,000 email accounts
- Average about 2.5 million messages per day, 90+% of which get stopped by reputation filtering before we even process them
It needs to do the following....
1) AntiSpam & Antivirus
2) SenderBase or Reputation Filtering: Our Ironport with SenderBase stops almost 90% of mail transfer requests before they even start using our bandwidth...due to bad reputation.
3) Users should be able to self-manage their spam and ham if they choose.
4) Invalid Recipient Lookup: Only allow incoming messages for recipients who actually have an account via LDAP lookup
5) Business Continuity... i.e must not be a single point of failure (clustering, failover, redundancy, etc...)
6) Ease of management: We are very short staffed and finding new IT people who want to work in higher ed has been a problem lately. We don't have extra staff time to devote to spending hours every week managing spam tools and config files. It needs to basically take care of itself except for initial setup and occasional tweaking and maintenance.
7) Cost: Must be significantly cheaper than our current solution otherwise it won't make any sense to switch.
Optional: Zimbra integration via a Zimlet would be nice but is not a requirement.
Open source would be great if it could meet the criteria above. They usually run into a problem at 6 though.
What products or roll-your-own solutions are other sites using, are you happy with it or not, would you make a different decision if you had to do it over again, how much time do you spend managing it, etc...
My short list of vendors I'm considering reviewing so far: Proofpoint, Red Condor, Mailspect
Thanks for any input....
Matt Mencel
Western Illinois University