OT: obscene message sizes and idiocy - a solution!

[D . Thomas Podnar]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 10:49:58AM -0500, Fairlight wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> I briefly tell the whole story in the following URL, so I can make this
> short and sweet:
> 
>      http://members.iglou.com/fairlite/flmailsizer.html
> 
> Suffice it to say that my days of people sending me -unsolicited- email with
> attachments ranging up to >900KB are -done-.  And they can be for you as
> well if you have the right tools and want to use what I'm providing freely.
> 
> *growls in frustration*
> *codes*
> *snorts in satisfaction*
> 
> mark->
> -- 
> Fairlight->   ||| It's a blanket, not a vampire!     | Fairlight Consulting
>   __/\__      |||                                    |
>  <__<>__>     |||                                    | http://www.fairlite.com
>     \/        |||                                    | info at fairlite.com
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Mark has solved part of his problem with a nice solution.

Since we're off-topic, I thought I'd share with you how we solved ours.

We've been around "forever" in internet years, and when that happens you
have email addresses that have been around forever, and get mountains of
spam.

Our issues in looking at in-house solutions were...
1) You still have to take time to manage / update them.
2) all of the incoming spam would still have to come in across the T-1 line,
then get filtered.

One of the things I didn't want to do was restrict email to only known
parties through one of the "click here and type in the almost invisible
letters and numbers to authenticate yourself" solutions, which have been
discussed here recently.

The solution for us was an outside service that handles all of the
spam and virus filtering and detection before hitting our network
connection, and that is constantly improved and updated by the vendor.

We chose the MX Logic service. After using it for a few months, I can
tell you we're thrilled.

The good news is that it does a great job of filtering and there is a
nice browser interface for checking your spam box, training it to
release messages it considers spam and you don't, etc. for, are you
ready, $2.00 PER PERSON per month. This is per human being, not per
mailbox, so aliases don't count.

The only bad news is that they have a $50 per month minimum invoice
for their top level service, and since I have less than 25 people I
pay the minimum.

But this may be the best $50 per month we've ever spent. Instead of
walking in every morning to 250 emails, I now have 5 - 10, and I don't
have to constantly manage in house tools.

All the MX records point to MX Logic servers, so that problem is also
handled in case we go down.

Anyway, I didn't realize these services were so inexpensive until we
spent a little time on the problem.
-- 
Tom
  D. Thomas Podnar
  Microlite Corporation
  2315 Mill Street
  Aliquippa PA USA 15001-2228
  724-375-6711
  888-257-3343 Sales
Developers of Microlite BackupEDGE