Re: Reviewing Spam Appliance Options

["Lager, Nathan T." <lagern@lafayette.edu>]

All Lafayette College were using ProofPoint appliances.  I can't speak to cost, as that's not in my wheelhouse, I just administer the things.   

I've been fighting the good fight (against spammers that is) for years.  I've used homegrown spamassassin solutions, barracuda, and proof point.  I have to say I love the proof point boxes!  If the cost doesn't turn make them out of your reach I highly recommend them.  I have never seen an appliance that allows so much flexibility. I have not yet come across a hairbrained rule I couldn't craft using their admin GUI.  The granularity at your disposal when configuring things is wonderful.  

We're sort of a do it yourself crowd in ITS at Lafayette, so it makes me sad whenever I hear about someone considering handing their data over to a third party.  Maybe its just control, or paranoia, but I really don't like the idea of putting my IT organizations reputation in the hands of someone else who's only loyalty to me is based on their personal gain.  The choice is up to you of course, but I'm going to keep my users data on premises for a long as I can.  

I hope that helps, let me know if you want any more details on proofpoint! 

--
Nathan Lager (RHCE RHCSA RHCVA)
System Administrator, Lafayette College

Matt Mencel <MR-Mencel@wiu.edu> wrote:

Interesting that ProofPoint is even more expensive. Yes....that is the other consideration.....should we even still be doing email ourselves. For some people that is a hard sell. Some see it as a security issue, some see it as losing full control, but I know a lot of schools are doing that. 


Matt 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Tom Golson" <tgolson@tamu.edu> 
To: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 6:47:19 PM 
Subject: Re: Reviewing Spam Appliance Options 


Hi Matt, 


Texas A&M also uses IronPort, but we are currently looking at ProofPoint. However, it is a more expensive option, not a less expensive option. If you really want to not spend on providing email, send the service to Office365 or Google Apps. 


--Tom 





On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Jason Bryan < jbryan@zimbra.com > wrote: 





Hi Matt, 


+1 for Proofpoint. I have never been involved in managing PP, but as an email recipient I know it does a good job filtering. 


You might consider adding Barracuda to your vendor list. 


-- 
Jason 






<blockquote>

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 




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