Openwave Opinions

Anyone have any openwave mail MX opinions or experience good or bad?

Design question: Is it better to have integrated or seperate Anti-spam and
Anti-virus built into the mail platform?

Thanks,

Shawn

Anyone have any openwave mail MX opinions or experience good or bad?

Every mail product that costs lots of money will yield a worse overall
solution that using a good free/open-source mail software (postfix, qmail,
exim... pick one) and spending money on people with good technical skills to
tune and adapt the system. Unless, of course, your financial resources are
unlimited...

Design question: Is it better to have integrated or seperate Anti-spam

and

Anti-virus built into the mail platform?

There are some design mistakes (such as trying to do these time-consuming
process synchronously) that both integrated and isolated anti-spam/virus
solutions have shown... the interesting thing with separate solutions is
that you can see the architeture from the configuration instructions, so
someone can quickly tell if that solution will scale or not. Using
monolithic or separate solutions will have some strategic consequences, but
design issues can arise in both.

Rubens

Rubens Kuhl Jr. writes on 11/8/2003 5:53 PM:

Anyone have any openwave mail MX opinions or experience good or bad?

Every mail product that costs lots of money will yield a worse overall
solution that using a good free/open-source mail software (postfix, qmail,
exim... pick one) and spending money on people with good technical skills to
tune and adapt the system. Unless, of course, your financial resources are
unlimited...

It is not just financial resources - it is also a factor of time to build a filter / set of filters from scratch (even with spamassasin + bogofilter you need to train it extensively, and tweak its rulesets to suit your mail flow).

Sometimes outsourcing corporate / isp mail handling to a provider like us, criticalpath, postini etc might be a good way to go.

Or you might elect to get a managed antispam solution that plugs into your mta (kind of like brightmail or spamsquelcher.org)

Design question: Is it better to have integrated or seperate Anti-spam

and

Anti-virus built into the mail platform?

The unix way - one tool per job. Build a mail system out of components - it is often the best way to go.

  srs

> Every mail product that costs lots of money will yield a worse overall
> solution that using a good free/open-source mail software (postfix,

qmail,

> exim... pick one) and spending money on people with good technical

skills to

> tune and adapt the system. Unless, of course, your financial resources

are

> unlimited...

It is not just financial resources - it is also a factor of time to
build a filter / set of filters from scratch (even with spamassasin +
bogofilter you need to train it extensively, and tweak its rulesets to
suit your mail flow).

I think this part of question was referring only to MTAs, not MTA +
anti-spam/virus tools. Anti-spam tuning is really a bit slower to do than
general performance tuning (MTA or MTA + anti-virus), but this will be true
to whatever MTA software and anti-spam one might buy.

Sometimes outsourcing corporate / isp mail handling to a provider like
us, criticalpath, postini etc might be a good way to go.

Outsourcing is usually a good way to get a solution with expertise instead
of a next->next->finish software installation and license to use it... but
for ISP use, integration with internal OSS (billing, tech-support etc.)
seems to be a challenge. Outsourcing costs also keeps most ISPs from using
such a solution, unless time-to-market is the one and only criteria.

Rubens

Rubens Kuhl Jr. writes on 11/8/2003 7:51 PM:

Sometimes outsourcing corporate / isp mail handling to a provider like
us, criticalpath, postini etc might be a good way to go.

Outsourcing is usually a good way to get a solution with expertise instead
of a next->next->finish software installation and license to use it... but
for ISP use, integration with internal OSS (billing, tech-support etc.)
seems to be a challenge. Outsourcing costs also keeps most ISPs from using
such a solution, unless time-to-market is the one and only criteria.

Well - there are ways (such as that the outsourcer only handles the MX for the domain[s], and then routes all inbound mail to the ISP, who handles file storage / pop3 / webmail). Or an onsite install of the mta / antispam solution etc, updated by the outsourcer (push updates using rsync, for example) but sitting on racks in the ISP's data center.