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Single solution for both spam and viruses?
I was recently hired by a company to take care of their growing local area network. The first thing they want me to is to
start taking steps to reduce the amount of spam and viruses coming into the company's mail server. What is the best way to
handle this? Will one product do it all?
-- Via the Internet
There are a couple of main ways to do this: Appliances and software.
There are appliances that will do one or both tasks. If you have the money (yes, appliance solutions can be more expensive), this kind of approach has several benefits. It reduces CPU loads on the mail server. When looking at this type of solution, be sure to look at the ongoing maintenance costs. Also check if the agreement covers advance shipping of replacement unit if yours were to fail to minimize the time you will be without protection.
If the appliance option is too expensive for you, there's software. Start by breaking the task into two parts: viruses and spam. There are both commercial and open source solutions that you can look at here. As with the appliance option, look at the costs of each option and the costs for ongoing support. With the open-source options, you may be able to find 3rd parties that will provide this for a fee.
If you don't go with that route, talk to others running these same packages to see what amount of time they spent working on that problem and assign a cost to that. This will help you identify what the real support costs is for all options. You may find the best answer is to look for best-of-breed applications, one for spam and one for viruses:
If you put together your own solution, keep in mind that it may take more than one computer to try to get the problem you are working on somewhere close to being under control. One company that I have talked to uses a three-tier approach: The first computer in their configuration runs an SMTP anti-virus gateway to do an initial screening of the e-mail and block those e-mails and/or attachments that contain viruses. The second computer runs the SpamAssassin open source anti-spam application. Meanwhile, the mail server also runs an anti-virus application (they are looking to add another anti-virus package, the open-source ClamAV, on the theory that it will catch anything that gets by the other anti-virus app).
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