Published April 8th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
Web and Email Filtering - Open Source vs Commercial
This is by no means an exhaustive comparison, but compares two specific products MailSweeper for Email Filtering/Monitoring, and Surfcontrol for Web Filtering/Monitoring to open source equivelents. It started because these two products were recommended to a client of ours for that purpose by another (not IT) company they deal with.
Bias disclaimer: We have some Linux systems in place (particularly for email virus scanning, spam filtering and reporting), and we’re planning to roll out Linux on a larger scale to this customer in their next round of upgrades. We like Linux because its cheap to install and maintain and very stable. Given that our customers are generally small businesses in remote locations these two attributes are critical for us.
MailSweeper - Email Filter/Scanner
The web site describing the mailsweeper product is pretty dense in marketing crap, but its essentially, an email virus scanner, Spam filter, and reporting tool rolled into one package. Essentially it does exactly the same thing as the Linux solution we have in place now (sendmail + Amavis + MIME Defang + Spam Assassin), except that while our Linux solution was free (as in it cost $0.00, and also as in we have the source code we can do whatever we like with it), I’m guessing this package would cost you serious $$$.
To implement MailSweeper across this particular customer’s entire operation would require a move away from Linux solutions for email. In turn requiring a large scale expenditure on both server hardware as well as software and licences. We’d need to licence and install Windows and a mail server software to run on Windows (Exchange?). As far as I can tell this would provide no benefits, but would expose the group to the instability and security vulnerabilities inherent in a Windows solution. The existing linux solution works well, with no licencing fees, and very modest hardware requirements.
Surf Control - Web Filtering
This appears to be a product that filters web sites to block access to porn and other undesirable sites, and provides monitoring tools to show who’s been accessing what. It can also block popups and banner ads. We’re planning to put a Linux box into this client’s head office with the next round of upgrades, and part and parcel of that is proxy server software (Squid). Once that’s in place, we can set up reporting for what web sites people have accessed, and so on (Calamaris). If you wanted to go to the extent of setting up a list of known “bad” sites, we can also set up Squid ACL’s to block those.
If popup and banner ads are a major problem, that can easily be overcome by installing something other than Internet Explorer as the default browser on the desktops. Most browsers (except IE) these days have ad blocking facilities, I’ve been using Mozilla (the Open Source descendent of Netscape’s browser) on my desktop for a while, and actually prefer it to IE for many reasons. Mozilla is free, as is the proxy and reporting software we’d use on Linux, presumably SurfControl would end up costing serious $$$ to roll out throughout the customer’s group of sites.
Conclusion
Looking at both products, my best estimate is that they don’t provide any advantages over the free and open source solutions we already have planned or in place in our hosting systems.
This is my estimation based on our customer’s systems, and needs and my own research. As always, your mileage might vary.