Hardware solutions

I had just mentioned that a hardware solution may be the way to go for ISPs in this post here. One of the hardware options for that sort of thing might be something from IronPort - here is a review of one of their bits here, the IronPort C60.

The review looks to be overall favorable, but when reading through it a bit, I cringe a little since it uses Symantec's Brightmail. At one time Symantec was a great company and it has built up that name to have fantastic recognition and penetration into the computing market.

The problem is, every single IT person I know these days hates Symantec and their products have really slipped over time. So I would be very hesitant to go with this particular product personally, but do keep in mind that the reviews look good on it - so perhaps this is quite good. I haven't used it, so I can't say.

We do use Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus Corporate Edition in the office and it works well enough for us. It isn't great, but it isn't bad either. The main issues that I have with it are that it is missing a few of the stats that I would like to see on the data it processes (not a big deal as long as the anti-virus part actually works), and the fact that its exclusion lists routinely ignore whatever you tell them to look at - especially if you are using another company's anti-virus to scan a e-mail.

The biggest issue that I have seen with Symantec is that while their website has a support section, they are hiding more and more of it in a section for which you have to pay in order to get access. And then frequently the "support" will note a problem and then have a "solution" which does nothing more than acknowledge that some people have that problem and some don't - no fixes though.

On a side note, generally the absolute worst Symantec product, by far, is WinFax. As long as this IronPort hardware doesn't ever have WinFax on it, it may just be okay after all.

Note that IronPort is its own entity and not Symantec - I am only pointing out that it contains an anti-spam solution from Symantec and warning as to previous experiences I (and the IT groups that I deal with) have had with Symantec over the years.