SA vs MIMESweeper

[Violaine Grimly <sa...@yahoo.fr>]

Hello,

One of our customers is (at last !) thinking about
using some anti-spam tool. He got a presentation of
MIMESweeper from some marketroid, which did a very
convincing "trust me if it's expensive it's because
it's good" job :-)

I googled a bit, but did not find any comparison
between SA and MIMESweeper. Do any of you have any
experience (good or bad) with MIMESweeper, can it
really compare to SA ?

Tia,
-- VG


	

	
		
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Re: SA vs MIMESweeper

[Martin Hepworth <ma...@solid-state-logic.com>]

Hi

well I used MimeSweeper/Sophos about 18 months and dropped it in favour 
of SA/MailScanner/Sophos/ClamAV/mailWatch.

why?

1. was using 4.2 and the upgrade to 4.3 was - uninstall and reinstall, 
given i have lots of custom policies (rules) this was not an option. The 
  upgrade option wasn't very good and 50% of the time barfed (according 
to the user group).

2. Huge performance gain in moving. My MIMESweeper ran on a dual PIII 
933MHz with 512MB ram and RAID 1 SCSI disks. took around 30 seconds per 
email to process. My 600mhz /512MB/IDE replace took around 5 seconds to 
process the email with more checks.

3. Lots of missed spam and (worse) lots of false positives. Was taking 
me most of day to release FP's. With the SA/MailScanner setup I hardly 
ever get any FP's, and those that are tend to have scores from 5-10 so 
the just get tagged and delivered anyway. I drop all spam with score > 10.

4. poor/slow remote admin (see 3!)

4. 4.3 was supposed  to be better (quicker) and have better spam trap, 
but see 1, and 5 is supposed to be even better than 4.3.

5. Slow to fix issues (lots of people reported problems with the system 
hanging (version 4.2) and requiring constant restarts, this took over 6 
months to fix)

5. Version 5 may be better, but looking the forum a while ago there is 
still plenty of room for improvement in the anti-spam system.

6. Alot of the anti-spam i was using  was using third party (user 
written) ehancements as the supplied stuff wasn't very good.

Yes it took me around 6 months on and off to get SA working well (SARE 
rules etc). But the result is much better than I ever got from 
MimeSweeper, even after 3 years!

I may have hit MimeSweeper at a bad time as it went through 3 different 
owners and ClearSwift may be doing a better job now they've had it for a 
couple of years.

may I suggest your customer
a) writes a set of requirements as to what the system should do!
b) plays with both systems and see how well they match the requirements.
c) registers on the MimEsweeper forum and has a look at the continued 
issues with the product.

--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300


Violaine Grimly wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> One of our customers is (at last !) thinking about
> using some anti-spam tool. He got a presentation of
> MIMESweeper from some marketroid, which did a very
> convincing "trust me if it's expensive it's because
> it's good" job :-)
> 
> I googled a bit, but did not find any comparison
> between SA and MIMESweeper. Do any of you have any
> experience (good or bad) with MIMESweeper, can it
> really compare to SA ?
> 
> Tia,
> -- VG
>

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Re: SA vs MIMESweeper

[Theo Van Dinter <fe...@kluge.net>]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 10:01:56PM +0100, Violaine Grimly wrote:
> I googled a bit, but did not find any comparison
> between SA and MIMESweeper. Do any of you have any
> experience (good or bad) with MIMESweeper, can it
> really compare to SA ?

I've never heard of it, but another person here at work says it's a
generic AV/anti-spam thing.  IMO, just use MailScanner, ClamAV, and
SpamAssassin. :)

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