On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> wrote:
IMO, the original question in this thread was on-topic, but unfortunately it got very little discussion
I like spamhaus, they run a quality list, but they want between $1900 and $19000 per year for their rsync service and you have to tell them how many email customers you're supporting in order to pay less than the max. That would be an acceptable price to pay for antispam efforts overall, but I couldn't afford to pay that for *each* of the dozens of services spamassassin consults while analyzing a message.
I wonder if the pricing you've got is old. I just did a test of a product and got pricing of $420/year for 600 users when I queried them. Essentially, less than $1/user/user. I understand that you are querying dozens of services with SpamAssassin, but I can guarantee you're not getting value for all that traffic you're generating. In our research, we've found very little value to stacking reputation services. And even stacking content filters can cause more problems than it solves if you don't pick them VERY carefully. Just as an example, last month one of the content filters (think of it as an anti-spam product like SpamAssassin, but NOT including any reputation component) I tested ran with approximately an 81% catch rate. Add in a single reputation filter, and that jumps up to 92.36%. Add in three reputation filters, and the new rate is 92.99%. Add in every single reputation filter I'm testing (that was 32 of them last month) and the rate barely jumped to 93.02%---but the false positive count jumped by 112 messages per 10,000 (because APEWS was somehow having a lousy month). In general, the more reputation services you include, the more likely it is you're going to have false positives. jms -- Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494 jms@Opus1.COM http://www.opus1.com/jms