[cobalt-users] Virus Scanning alternatives - For ISPS and larger providers

["Ted" <ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Been reading about all the bells and whistles and mailscanner and fprot
virus scanning on our
domain servers and wanted to add my thoughts and what we did once our mail
volume exceeded
our cobalt server.


Well that's nice if your base is small, but we outsource our email virus
filtering and Spam filtering.
Since we have thousand of clients and tons of domains ( hundreds) we decided
against receiving a
notice every time a client received a virus. it was really clogging up our
mail boxes. We also do
not send notices to those sending since 99 percent are spoofed addresses
anyway.

For the best solution on the planet we use Postini. They have over 250 mail
servers (2 clusters)
and filter out up to 98 percent of the trash and 100 percent of the viruses.
We then use
vilter & an antivirus software package on our primary Sun server to filter
all email both inbound and
outbound , as to protect others from our users.. Again we over loaded a
cobalt years ago
when we put 650 customers on one unit and about fried the thing. It took 15
minutes on
a LAN just to add another client. We decided then to move our  mail services
off, and
place then on Sun Sparcs/Ultra Sparcs. Now this was years ago and I have not
yet
put the newer servers to the same test but I do know that it is nice to have
alternatives
and provide a nice web based solution that does not cost you working all
day, every
day on the mail server.

The system saves us allot of bandwidth as well, and pays for itself. Since
we never get the 85
percent junk that arrives daily (Spam & viruses) it saves server resources
as well.


For those interested check out Postini - http://www.postini.com
They charged us .25 (year twenty five cents) per head, and it has been the
best money we have ever
spent. The system catches 98 percent of the SPAM, and all of the viruses and
allows my clients
to still read the infected email, without ever downloading it to our server.
Nice and safe. very easy to
use as well, and you can add all the domains you want to the system as you
go.


Vilter - http://freshmeat.net/projects/vilter/?topic_id=29

Vilter will run any command line Antivirus software and either delete it
or change its header to mark it. Runs on Linux, Solaris, and BSD,
and runs very well.

We use UVscan on our primary server and it works well .