Why do you believe a service is better than a gateway appliance? Just trying to pick your brain here.

My thoughts on this is that a service like say Postini costs a number of dollars per month, per mail box. That can add up big time.

The appliances also do have subscriptions and support for the most part, but I suspect that you’d run cheaper in terms of dollars and cents than a service over the cost of the year.

I do understand that having the leverage of millions of dollars in infrastructure of the service provider is a big time bonus, especially in the event of a disaster situation, but we are VERY cost conscious here in our IT department.

Also of note, the ‘appliance’ I recommended is virtual and the jew in me(yes…part jew, 50% actually) LOVES the price tag on it!!!! FREE!!!

With that said, thank you for stopping by Gavin, and I will be bookmarking your Domino blog tomorrow at work as I saw some things on there of interest.

We use Sophos Anti-Virus, which has low, per client licensing, that allows staff/students to also use it at home. I don’t think any other enterprise product allows for that.

SAV has Linux covered:

http://www.sophos.com
/products/enterprise
/endpoint
/security-and-control
/linux/index.html

From the site:
Sophos Endpoint Security and Control provides superior on-access scanning for Linux desktops, laptops and servers, delivering excellent performance, stability and reliability, along with out-of-the-box support for the widest range of Linux distributions.

About the company:
Sophos is a world leader in IT security and control solutions purpose-built for business, education, government organizations and service providers. Our reliably engineered, easy-to-operate products protect over 100 million users in more than 150 countries from viruses, spyware, adware, Trojans, intrusion, spam, policy abuse, and uncontrolled network access.

The mail server is just too important to be stuffed around by security software. You should use an appliance or a service.

Appliance: Any Gateway firewall which has anti-spam and anti-virus filtering built-in.

Service: IMHO Even better. Pick a service that will scan inbound and outbound mail and redirect your traffic there first. You can have your spam sent to a special account eg: spam@mycompany.com so that it’s recoverable in case of over-sensitive filters.

If you look around hosting sites, you’ll be able to locate a service that uses multiple products. We did that and have never looked back.

I hope it helps you Joe. Let us know in the comments!