[Leica] Palo Alto Control, we have a possible solution and an alternative

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2008-10-16-10:16:21 Brian Reid:
> I've tried 2 commercial spam-control services, and neither one was 
> satisfactory. I haven't tried Spamhouse; I tried Trend's MAPS RBL, which 
> was useless, and I tried Spamikaze, which worked moderately well but went 
> out of business.

An organization I've been working with has, like everyone, been trying
to deal with the spam avalanche.  We spent years installing more and
more layers of anti-spam stuff (enjoying some recent fairly efficient
plug-in-module framework whose name now escapes me), and upgrading
hardware every three years or so.  And yes, that whole time we've seen
no reason to move off Postfix as an MTA.  (Is anyone smart still using
sendmail?  Is qmail still supported?)

But a year or two ago, we got a Barracuda Networks

  http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en

box in to demo.  The whole idea of paying more that it'd cost us to
build and configure a box from scratch, and paying a subscription fee on
top of that, kind of rubbed us the wrong way, sturdy DIY geeks that we
were.  But damned if the thing didn't work, and keep working, taking the
brunt of the spam avalanche while maintaining decent throughput, and
without too many false positives.  Some people at Barracuda keep
scrambling to keep the filters up-to-date, and you pretty much just keep
accepting their updates and stand back.

(I haven't been involved in the day-to-day maintenance of this setup,
but I haven't heard anything bad, and I think I would have if something
were busted.)

Other folk I know (including the guy who's letting me glom of his
servers for my email domain) are trying the usual stuff, with the usual
consequences: miscellaneous blacklists (which sometimes turf email from
people I'd like to hear from); greylisting (where email from someone who
hasn't yet successfully gotten mail through is rejected "try again
later", on the theory that real MTAs do this properly but inject-and-run
spam senders don't; this seems pretty effective, but leads to unexpected
delays, generally right when I'm waiting for that vendor web-account
password reminder or confirmation email).

 -Jeff