Ask Slashdot: Why Are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business? (slashdot.org) 244
broswell writes: For years we used Postini for spam filtering. Google bought Postini in 2007, operated it for 5 years and then began shutting it down. Then we moved to MX Logic. McAfee bought MX Logic, and McAfee was purchased by Intel. Now Intel is shutting down the service. Neither company chose to raise prices, or spin off the division. Anyone want to speculate on the reasons?
Maybe it's not profitable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe it's not profitable?
Re:Maybe it's not profitable? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's as likely both bought out companies had a patent or some other similar technology that the large company wanted. 5 yeas is probably how long they had to keep the old company running to avoid some legal issues such as employee rights or stock market regulations.
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe increased amounts of spam helps sell more higher performance hardware? Some UNIX workstations vendors had a "slow software is good for business" mentality because it kept demand for new CPU's up. They absolutely hated it when developers starting optimizing code rather than adding new features.
You might take a look at appriver (Score:2)
Barracuda networks also sells a SaaS spam filtering service, haven't used it, but have heard good things about it.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe 5 years is the mean time from purchase to "shut down the old company's high profile PR gestures because it has been `long enough.'"
You look bad if you shut it down right away without giving people time. The longer you wait, the less news there is. After 5 years, it isn't part of the business news related to having bought the old company; only nerds will even hear about it.
Re: (Score:2)
In exactly that case I'd actually consider a reinforced tinfoil hat.
Re: (Score:3)
In exactly that case I'd actually consider a reinforced tinfoil hat.
Oh no, he's going full-strainer. Never go full strainer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps Anonymous Coward's point is that Gmail didn't matter from day one because of its contextual ads.
Re: (Score:2)
Serving up ads above or next to a message isn't the same as adding an ad to the message.
Google / Postini (Score:4, Informative)
Guessing Google integrated the parts of Postini they wanted into Gmail's spam filtering and has no desire to help improve other email providers spam filtering.
McAfee recommends migrating from MXLogic to Proofpoint -- an exclusive partner. In this pdf they call it a more feature rich product. And I'd guess they are getting some sort of financial incentive to recommend Proofpoint. http://www.mcafee.com/resources/faqs/faq-eol-email-security.pdf
The elephants in the room (Score:3, Informative)
Google had no need for Postini. Google's own spam filtering in Gmail is pretty good. Probably as best as spam filtering could be, under the circumstances. So that's one elephant in the room.
The other elephant in the room is Microsoft, with Hotmail, or Office 365, or whatever it's called these days. I don't have any firsthand exposure to that service, but from what I hear its built-in spam filtering is also fairly good.
Big email providers like that have no need to use an external, third party spam filtering service, since they have the technology, and the scale, to implement it in house. Organizations that outsource their email service to these elephants get spam filtering as part of their service and, again, have little need for a third party service.
About the only likely market for third party spam filtering services would be small to mid-range ISPs or organizations that want to run their E-mail in house. They wouldn't typically have the in-house technology to implement spam filtering, and would rely on a third party. Seems like a fairly small market to me, and with E-mail generally on a slow, steady decline there doesn't seem to be a lot of market opportunities here, for third party spam filtering services.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually Hotmail/Outlook etc have a pretty bad false positive rate. For my clients, I have far more complaints abut personal email from my server being redirected to the Junk folder from Hotmail users than from any other provider and that's on top of the once a year ban my mail server.gets from Microsoft where everything bounces until I email them and they remove the block with no feedback as to why it happened.
Re: (Score:2)
And then you will never know at all about the mails that have been blocked completely. Those you get in the Junk folder may just be the tip of the iceberg that has a probability to be spam but still might not be.
Re: (Score:3)
I have far more complaints abut personal email from my server being redirected to the Junk folder from Hotmail users than from any other provider
The vast majority of SPAM never even makes it to the Junk folder.
Re: (Score:3)
I think email is on the decline just like the iPhone isn't selling anymore - only in news reports. Yes, it's not as popular as it once was however it is still a major method of communicating with customers. The availability of Google Apps (and similar services) for small to medium sized businesses is - from a sys admin perspective - an amazing thing. Their spam/malware protection is better than any other product I've ever used and it does it's work transparently.
I would counter that not only is email not in
Re: (Score:3)
email is numerically "in decline" because much of what is on twitter on other proprietary apps would have been in email in the past.
One thing I've noticed is that an increasing number of companies are responding to email support requests in a serious manner, because the bean counters are finally figuring out how much cheaper email support is than phone support because it is asynchronous.
Re:The elephants in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
About the only likely market for third party spam filtering services would be small to mid-range ISPs or organizations that want to run their E-mail in house.
You're completely ignoring every company that runs an Exchange server.
Seems like a fairly small market to me
It's a huge market.
with E-mail generally on a slow, steady decline
With such a low ID number, you can't be an idiot college student. Maybe you've just never worked for an Very Large Company.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of those Very Large Companies are just outsourcing their e-mail because it's a major-league-bitch to run it themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually you'll find lots of those companies are outsourcing some aspects of it to get some fancy cloud features, but are still running major exchange backends.
Re: (Score:2)
BWAHAHAHAHA.
Thanks for the mid-afternoon laugh.
At scale, Exchange is a right PITA to run.
Re: (Score:3)
I guess it depends on your definition of "at scale". With some planning, it seems fairly easy to get decent scaling and availability. DAGs work pretty well. The thing that seems to get harder is the planning and licensing.
IMHO, Exchange 2013 has been a big step backwards in reliability and management. My conspiracist opinion is that Microsoft is deliberately trying to make it less appealing for SMBs to run in house because they want them hooked in as a permanent revenue stream to O365. The UI has lost
Re: The elephants in the room (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I work for a moderately large university. We outsourced our email, which used to run on Exchange, to Google years ago. We're a long way from being the only ones.
Re: (Score:2)
You're completely ignoring every company that runs an Exchange server.
You can run a hybrid Exchange environment, and use Microsoft Online Protection for Exchange [microsoft.com].
It's like $3 a month per mailbox, when solutions like McAfee's were more than $10 a month and did a poorer job at spam filtering.
So again, why would they want to pay more for spam filtering than they had to, if nobody is doing better than Google or MS these days?
Re: (Score:2)
I have Postfix with Spamassassin and ClamAV on a gateway server that the passes email on to the Exchange infrastructure. I wouldn't dream of leaving an Exchange MTA listening to the big wide world on Port 25.
Re: (Score:2)
You're completely ignoring every company that runs an Exchange server
A couple of points. Open source tools and blacklisting services have become pretty good at filtering spam, and archiving email. This has only turned email into more of a commodity business.
Also Postini wasn't just about spam filtering. It was also about company-wide email archival and regulatory compliance. That being said, after the NSA debacle and the ever increasing demands of the NSA being in control of everything without judicial oversight, any foreign-based companies still using Postini or MX Logic wo
I think the GP's point (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I work for a very large global IT firm, and don't remember the last time that Exchange hiccuped.
Re: (Score:2)
I work for a very large global IT firm too, and I remember the last time Exchange hiccuped this week. It's very good at being non-obvious about it's connection issues, until it takes 40 minutes for the person at the desk next to you to receive an email with nothing more than a link they requested.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean it hiccuped more than once this week? Yikes!
Re: (Score:2)
I work for a very large global IT firm, and don't remember the last time that Exchange hiccuped.
but your BOFH does.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, mobile devices. It's very hard to support mobile devices if your e-mail server is behind a firewall. So mail naturally moved to the cloud for most businesses. Once you're paying someone to host an Exchange server, you might as well pay them manage it, hence the rise of Office365 and what not.
Re: (Score:2)
No it isn't. Just forward a few ports and you are done.
Outlook is more of an issue because the certificate handling between Outlook/Exchange is broken now that you cannot get SAN certificates.
Re: (Score:2)
No it isn't. Just forward a few ports and you are done.
And make sure you have a public IP address and DNS entry, make sure you are up on your security patches on your server and have help desk staff to help people configure their mobiles, etc. Furthermore, outsourcing e-mail typically gives you mobile device management, two-factor authentication and a lot of extra goodies. It's very hard to implement the complete package yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Setting up mobiles: Yes, with Exchange, in my experience it's necessary to go through the process several times, because, for whatever reason, it will fail, fail again and then eventually work.
Exchange provides remote wipe capability for connected mobile devices.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps it depends on exactly how the Exchange server is configured behind a firewall. Why else would anyone have ever needed a SAN certificate with a non-registered name?
Re:The elephants in the room (Score:5, Interesting)
Google had no need for Postini. Google's own spam filtering in Gmail is pretty good. Probably as best as spam filtering could be, under the circumstances. So that's one elephant in the room.
The other elephant in the room is Microsoft, with Hotmail, or Office 365, or whatever it's called these days. I don't have any firsthand exposure to that service, but from what I hear its built-in spam filtering is also fairly good.
Big email providers like that have no need to use an external, third party spam filtering service, since they have the technology, and the scale, to implement it in house. Organizations that outsource their email service to these elephants get spam filtering as part of their service and, again, have little need for a third party service.
About the only likely market for third party spam filtering services would be small to mid-range ISPs or organizations that want to run their E-mail in house. They wouldn't typically have the in-house technology to implement spam filtering, and would rely on a third party. Seems like a fairly small market to me, and with E-mail generally on a slow, steady decline there doesn't seem to be a lot of market opportunities here, for third party spam filtering services.
No, email in general is as strong as ever. The reason why it's not profitable is precisely there, however: it's mostly small ISPs who would buy this, and I don't think anybody would use their email service to begin with. The vast majority of us use either Gmail or Outlook, or a small number will self host our own personal email servers. It's a little shakier among smaller, paid email services such as Proton Mail [protonmail.com](Privacy comes at a price, but I've heard their free version is still pretty decent), but my guess is these people also make enough to run their own spam filtering, so you're correct in saying the market's too small. Email as a whole is still a very popular medium, however, and I wouldn't go so far to say it's on a decline...
Re: (Score:2)
On that note, it seems likely to me that the biggest mail companies benefit greatly from spam. After all, they would be in a better position then their competitors to filter it, and have no risk of being "accidentally" put on someone's blacklist.
Re: (Score:2)
and have no risk of being "accidentally" put on someone's blacklist.
word is Microsoft has many servers appearing on Spamcannibal's blacklist, and also, occasionally a message will get bounced back b/c the MS SMTP server is listed on Spamcop.
Of course they will occasionally have IP addresses put on someone's blacklist, but if it starts to cause problems ---- they have more resources available to them to address it, before a significant number of customers notice.
Re: (Score:2)
I happily use spamcop, because they do one thing relatively well, and when it's not well, medicate it quickly (;-))
--davecb@spamcop.net
Re: (Score:2)
Only a few hundred comments in to find a reasoned analysis. Not bad.
Money is the way. (Score:2)
Far too many people in this world dedicate themselves to profit rather than what would serve their fellow human beings the best. Never will understand why though. As a species, human kind has depended on the help of others to advance.
Re:Money is the way. (Score:4, Informative)
I think you will find that "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley explains it pretty well, in terms of game theory. Of course the game theory stuff is just analogical and suggestive, but I find it convincing.
Basically the default condition (just because it's mathematically the simplest) is where everyone is looking out for himself. That's the imaginary "state of nature" that Thomas Hobbes depicted in "Leviathan":
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
Writing in the 17th century, of course, Hobbes knew little about evolution and nothing of ethology. His knowledge of pre-agricultural societies was drawn exclusively from the travellers' tales of those who had been to the Americas, Africa, or the East Indies. Thus he assumed, reasonably enough, that without formal states and societies people would have no communities at all. That turns out not to be the case, as hunter-gatherers normally live in groups ranging from family size to a few hundred - and they cooperate intensively.
Models of Hobbes' extreme case show that, as he expected, it's not good. People do vastly better if they cooperate, so we almost always find society developing naturally. People develop morals, and come to expect honesty and straight dealing - even altruism, which is often repaid.
Now here is the interesting part: in a society where 19 out of 20 are honest, a tempting niche opens up for those who aren't. By pretending to be honest, these criminals (or banksters, politicians, marketing executives, lawyers or whatever you want to call them) leech off the work of others to live comfortably with little effort. It seems that mathematics and nature are against efforts to make everyone good, because in a society where most people are good it is just too tempting to be bad.
Re: (Score:3)
Sod it, wrong Matt Ridley book. Instead, try "The Origins of Virtue" http://www.amazon.co.uk/Origin... [amazon.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
In societies small enough to not need money, help in return for help works just fine "You help me build a house today, I help you build yours tomorrow" In a large society, that doesn't work so well. The g
Private e-mail servers are obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
Because pretty much everyone uses gmail, yahoo, Office365 or some other mail service which already does spam filtering. The only person in recent history that I know of running a private e-mail server was Hillary Clinton and see how much good it did her...
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking to close to 2000.
How many corporations and, especially organizations, have moved to the Gmail hosted mail servers? My university moved to it 3-5 years ago. Most of the non-profits I run into are running it. For many it's worth the cost.
Re: (Score:2)
Many have also moved to Office 365.
But this with having Gmail or Office 365 - that's really to put your eggs in one gigantic basket.
Re: (Score:2)
large international IT services provider
no private email servers!
Reasonable advice mainly because of security issues (open relays and other misconfigurations). But private servers, or anything peer-to-peer are anathema to your companies business model. So I'd take that advice with a grain of salt.
Lack of market (Score:2)
At the top end, the big tech companies like Google or Microsoft have their own spam-filtering systems in-house. At the bottom, individuals and entities too small to run their own mail servers either depend on Bayesian filtering in their e-mail clients or get email from one of the big tech companies. And in the middle, they either outsource their email to one of the big tech companies or can put together their own spam-filtering solution readily enough using available tools like SpamAssassin that're mostly o
Labor costs (Score:5, Funny)
It isn't profitable. It's enormously expensive to pay so many employees to read EACH AND EVERY email to determine if it's spam.
I'll go the other way here, spearphishing (Score:4, Insightful)
In the past, spam was mass-flung with no real power. Filtering it was a relatively easy task, with an acceptable false positive rate and an even more acceptable false negative rate.
Today, while those spams still exist, between e-mail client junk folders and greylisting, the mass-flung spam is little more than an annoyance -- it doesn't have any real negative effect in term of dollars. Virus scanners catch those attachments pretty well too.
But now we have spear phishing -- real-world big-business, hand-crafted, artisan spamming. No spam filter is ever able to catch any of those. And they do real damage creating real monetary losses for big and small business alike.
So if your spam filtering business can catch the easy ones that do no real damage, and can't catch the hard ones that do the real big damage, then who's your paying market?
Re: (Score:2)
This is true to some extent. Some targeted attacks are very hard to catch, though there are things you can do to mitigate them.
But you still need a filter to catch all the background crap that would otherwise overwhelm your inbox.
Re: (Score:2)
real-world big-business, hand-crafted, artisan spamming
Yes, more or less. The "big-business" stuff, I can handle. There's a profit motive and when they discover that there's no money to be made, they'll move on.
The stuff I worry about is based on other motives [infosecinstitute.com] which people may not recognize as quickly. Our neighborhood has been the occasional target of several spear phishing attacks. Purportedly about security, police activity and local crime, we have received some carefully crafted personalized e-mail that turns out to originate from phony domains, set up wi
Easier to herd ferrets on Adderall (Score:2)
Can't Compete with Barracuda and Spamassasin (Score:2, Informative)
On the commercial side, there is Barracuda. On the free side, there is Spamassasin. That doesn't leave much room for others.
there are some good people still in this business. (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.roaringpenguin.com... [roaringpenguin.com] they provide and support CANIT PRO, which is basically mimedefang and spamassassin on a debian base, with dynamically updated blacklists and filtering rules. It works really well. David is one of the guys behind behind mimedefang, so you are also helping open source by going with these guys. The pricing for us was really decent.
They usually work with appliances, but we managed to use our own configuration to do some sweet stuff: we put the mail filtering cluster in the DMZ, along with the DB. but we put the customization interface is on an internal network. That way there is no firewall exception for the DMZ (ok except SMTP... can't avoid that one.) and the DMZ gateway doesn't need access to internal credentials at all (Active Directory in our case) It just knows that the interface machine on the inside is trustworthy. Even though the DB has no access to authentication services, the users can still customize their filtering to their desire.
I think for big companies, one concern is that I have never heard anyone rave about spam filtering. In terms of brand-awareness it is a completely one way street, Either people are satisfied with it, in which case they shrug, or they get irrationally violently abusive of the service, and have un-realistic expectations. It is a risk for any major brand to operate spam filtering, with literally no upside (ok, aside form revenue, but if it is a small part of a business, the reputation risk might outweigh the revenues.) Touching people's email brings out all the consipacy buffs you can imagine, and for some small but vociferous group they always have their own solution, and whatever the email admin does is crap. That's a thing that was great about Roaring Penguin's CanIT PRO when we rolled it out, it gave each user the ability to turn off the filtering entirely, if that's what they wanted.
It worked like a charm. Whenever we got some idiot (the truth hurts!) who thought they could do better, we just said fine, here is how to turn it off. Out of 6000 boxes, we had about 200 opt-out right away, most of them turned it back on within a few days, after a year it was down to 60 or so, and then when there were some malware infection episodes, it came out that their 'custom' solutions were not actually working that well, and everyone came back into the fold. Being able to let people opt-out saved us literally months of pointless arguments while letting us deploy good service for the co-operative many.
This was for about 7000 mailboxes, which is small as far as mail installations go these days. The real clients for this stuff is hosting providers and outsourcing companies (cloud based) I think the reason for large companies exiting the business is the huge trend of small companies to cloud, there just isn't much of a market for small email installs anymore... People are using huge hosted configurations. It's gradually getting dismantled now because of some organization move to a single outsourced solution with many hundreds of thousands of mailboxes...
Re:there are some good people still in this busine (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for the vote of confidence! (I'm from Roaring Penguin and am the MIMEDefang gal). But actually I go by DIanne [skoll.ca] now.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's a small market (Score:3)
The anti-spam market is small, mature and shrinking as more and more companies outsource their email to Microsoft or Google. While it can be profitable, the actual numbers are way too small to interest behemoths like Intel or Google.
I happen to run a small anti-spam company. We're doing extremely well, but that's because we have low overhead and can survive quite nicely on the little slice of market share we have. But I have no illusions that my company will be the next Facebook or Google or whatever... we'll chug along steadily for as long as we want to, and we'll make a very nice living at it, but that's about it.
Re: (Score:2)
as more and more companies outsource their email to Microsoft or Google...
Wait until the cloud craze is over in 4 or 5 years, and businesses begin to get a few more years of experience: to start and recognize what the true disadvantages are / what they have actually lost, and what the extra costs are in this type of outsourcing, So they can make rational decisions instead of buzzword/cloud-initiative-driven decisions.
There have always been E-mail hosting providers....
One of the problems is, goi
Re: (Score:2)
Wait until the cloud craze is over in 4 or 5 years...
You think? I don't think it'll be over. I think it will continue to grow. For most businesses, running a mail server is a pain in the butt and not part of their core business.
One of the problems is, going with a large hosting provider, means your company no longer gets to set the operational policies
Most people don't care.
There are of course additional security risks, and by using a hosting provider, your mailboxes may be additionally subjec
use ipv6 to get rid of the spam (Score:2)
put your mail server on a aaaa record only and you will see so little spam that you can filter it manually.
Re: (Score:2)
That is actually not true. We offer a hosted anti-spam service and the ratio of spam-to-ham coming in over IPv6 is still pretty high --- major providers such as Google and Comcast are using IPv6, so it's no longer a "filter-out-the-lusers" protocol.
No clue why they are going away, but... (Score:2)
Can't answer any questions about why the spam filtering services you mention are being discontinued, but the providers I work with that use a spam filter for their customers are mainly using Edgewave, with a smaller amount using Barracuda.
Hopefully because spam filters don't work (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to end spam, you need to acknowledge that spam is an economic problem and spammers send out spam because they make money doing it. There is one and only one way to end spam, and that is to prevent spammers from making money off of it. No legal - or extralegal - action will slow it down by any meaningful amount. Interrupt the money flow and the spammers will find other work.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone
Re: (Score:3)
If you want to end spam, you need to acknowledge that spam is an economic problem and spammers send out spam because they make money doing it.
So how are you going to do this? You do get modded "insightful" for this but in true business fashion you don't give any real solutions. Not even any hints to real solutions.Not even a solid and workable definition of what is spam, and what is not. Often spam is defined as "unsolicited' but what is "unsolicited" really? I put my e-mail address on my web site, asking people to contact me. Anyone can find the address and start sending e-mails on any topic - are these solicited or unsolicited? If you say it's
By the Architect, may his dividers never slip (Score:2)
I'm not saying it's the Freemasons, but it's the Freemasons.
Re: (Score:2)
The US government is heavily into outlook. Think of how many millions of installations that is.
Re:Nobody is buying email software anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Outlook is for business, because Exchange is for business.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft does give a version of Office 365 away for free for anyone. Its way wayyyy better than Google Docs. Also the commercial version of Office 365 is cheaper that Google docs in the UK & EU. Might even be cheaper in the US also but I dont care enough to look.
I created a startup in 2009 and decided on Google Docs as the main business organisation platform. It worked great while we were only 3 staff and our requirements were very simple. As we added staff and complexity Google Docs got worse and wors
Re: (Score:3)
Microsoft does give a version of Office 365 away for free for anyone. Its way wayyyy better than Google Docs
I don't know about features (I only use the most basic of features in office apps) but I've found Google Docs to have far more polish. That is, it seems faster, objects seem to go where you intend them easier, and it's also easier to figure out how to do what you're trying to do.
Re: (Score:2)
LaTeX forumulae? No.
Relying on Office365 working in a non-Microsoft browser? Absolutely.
It works fine in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, with no substantial differences between those and IE (if anything, non-IE is faster). I haven't tried Konquerer, but it might work passably even there.
Re: (Score:2)
And gmail just works.
Works with what? Given that it has about 5% of the feature support of Outlook why is your comment even relevant?
Re: Nobody is buying email software anymore (Score:5, Funny)
So anybody could get it for free except people like Abraham and Moses?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Nobody is buying email software anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually..... one of my clients is an E-mail hosting provider, and Microsoft has basically murdered the E-mail hosting business by giving away Office 365 for free to Academic entities and non-profits.
MS makes this out as a "donation", but the schools were reluctantly forced into switching to O365, even though the IT administrators felt that this would be technically inferior, and they expect the quality of support will be much lower.......
The simple fact is that Google and Microsoft are changing the E-mail hosting business from a business that can generate a little bit of profit, to a business that is completely non-profitable, and only very large providers will be able to offer this service.
Also, Microsoft and Google have their own spam filtering solutions, and they don't need to buy someone else's product, So they are also basically killing the Spam Filtering solution industry.
Spam filtering solutions have become very expensive over the years ---- so, if you want to sell a spam filtering solution, you basically get two choices: Either be non-profitable, or sell at a very high and increasing price, to a customer base that is rapidly decreasing in number (As Google and O365 are well on their way towards taking over the entire E-mail hosting business and eliminating all competition), and the higher prices will drive people towards the alternatives.
OR: Sell a specialized solution with extra features such as E-mail encryption or Archiving features that MS and Google cannot offer at scale (YET).
Re: (Score:2)
Sell a specialized solution with extra features such as E-mail encryption or Archiving features that MS and Google cannot offer at scale (YET).
Why can't MS or Google offer E-mail encryption at scale? And I know that MS does offer online Archives as part of O365.
Re: (Score:2)
Google does offer email archiving at whatever scale you want to throw at it.
Re: (Score:3)
The fact that you have a MAIL SERVICE that literally eats the entire resources of a server, belches and screams for more
I -- as an end user -- don't care.
all while delivering bare functionality, for a minimal number of people is an absolute joke.
I use T-bird on my Linux desktop at home, and Outlook integrated with Exchange on my work laptop. Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.
What exactly do you call Lightning [mozilla.org]? Looks a lot like a calendar to me.
Lightning even supports a few network calendar formats natively. Need to sync with CalDAV? There's a plugin [sogo.nu] for that.
Oh, I see...they're not automatically included. That's a positive since not everyone needs those extra features. Some people just want email. That's what makes it nice. That's why people used to flock to Firefox before it became a giant, bloated piece of garbage.
There are a lot of things that can be said that are negative a
Re: (Score:3)
I use T-bird on my Linux desktop at home, and Outlook integrated with Exchange on my work laptop. Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.
The non-e-mail functionality does not make it better at e-mail. i still haven't figured out how to add custom headers to individual Outlook e-mails, or prevent it from rewriting the addresses I put in, or check mail routing for a message before sending, or export an e-mail in SMTP format, or prevent it from modifying headers or body (tus making it useless with standalone encryption/signing), or a bunch of other things that are e-mail specific.
As for non-e=mail features, some of them are a bonanza for malwa
Re: (Score:2)
So tell us, O wise Chas, what do you use instead of Outlook/Exchange/Lync?
Re: (Score:3)
Chas might be more sophisticated than I am, but I've been happily using postfix since abandoning sendmail in `99.
And on the client side... SMTP and ( IMAP or POP )
Re: (Score:2)
mere thought of that java monstrosity makes me shiver. i spent 9 years administering that thing (among other things). upgrades were hellish nightmares. spam filter training never worked properly. it was power and memory hungry. it was horrible and got worse with each version.
when i went for a manually configured postfix+dovecot+spamassassin and ejabberd, i felt it was more user/admin friendly. speedwise, it flew circles around any zimbra/exchange installation i had ever seen. ms office communications server
Re: (Score:2)
I agree - and the Outlook junk mail filter is smoking something as well - letting through spam and blocking legitimate mail.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that you have a MAIL SERVICE that literally eats the entire resources of a server, belches and screams for more
Linux mail servers are the same way. You have to consider how businesses use Exchange, to understand Exchange's resource usage is not unreasonable. The average Exchange user's Mailbox size these days is about 5 gigabytes, for most companies; the software is a full-text indexing behemoth.
Also, Exchange does not scale down to small sizes well. The resource usage is much reasonabl
Re: (Score:2)
I have yet to see a Linux mail server that eats as much RAM and CPU cycles as Exchange. Exchange may be the best at what it does, but that's hardly an argument in favor of its nature as a specifically designed resource hog.
Re: (Score:2)
The ONLY thing Exchange has going for it is that it's integrated into [legacy ERP software]
Even a broken BOFH is right twice a business cycle.
Re: (Score:2)
Gmail is great but try sharing multiple mailboxes and calendars and let me know how far you get
There are other tools you can use for that. E-mail is not the only way to collaborate, and your calendars don't need to go through the same software.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who proposes "fixing" lack of features in a software product by educating the customers is an idiot, and trying to fix anything by educating the users is worse than idiotic.
Outlook works the way people expect things to work. Exchange is a horribly painful way to enable that. Doing these things another way is frustrating all your users for the sake of your personal convenience. Is that your job, really?
Re: (Score:2)
There is no such thing as a free lunch. When there's no competition left then we will suddenly see such services being an extra cost.
The problem with Office 365 is also that you have no ability to control the spam filter - legitimate mails gets junked without your knowledge.
Re: (Score:2)
legitimate mails gets junked without your knowledge.
That's a good start.... But how many 10s of dollars extra per month per mailbox, are you willing to spend, to have more control?
Re: (Score:2)
What is the price of a lost important mail?
Re: (Score:2)
What is the price of a lost important mail?
It's pretty much zero, because if the email is important enough to actually matter, you will be asking the recipient to let them know, and contacting them over another channel, if they didn't get it.
So if the important mail is "lost", the actual price is attributable not to the loss of the E-mail, but human error in not anticipating the possibility of a lost e-mail and making sure the message gets through.....
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't work. It's not always apparent what's important, or even who's important, until much later.
Re: (Score:2)
Spamhaus? Spamhaus is nothing but a DNSBL. It won't catch more than 60% of spam, and that's being extremely generous.
Re: (Score:2)
why on earth would they sell the anti-spam service they've bought as an independent service under someone else's name?
Because that was McAfee's business, and it was a bigger money-maker than a one-time license sale of some On-premises product.
That is.... until Intel bought McAfee and killed BOTH the On-Premise products AND the SaaS products.
I believe Intel has a specific purpose in mind for the McAfee acquisitions and it involves putting out their own product, not continuing to service McAfee's cu