[clug] Interesting article

[Steve Walsh]

Michael James wrote:
> Commodity "dial tone" services offer better quality, performance
>  and capability that anything the traditional legacy players can supply,
>  and make in-house provision of these services economically laughable.
> eg: Gmail gives a much better service (on any metric)
>        than the thousands of corporate exchange servers,
>        that are so expensively mismanaged.
>   
Having just gone through a whole bunch of documentation as part of a 
student email migration, neither gmail or hotmail (or hotmail as 
exchange labs) explicitly guarantee the availability or accessibility of 
your email. They generally (from what I could extract with pokers and 
teeth pliers) do "backup" by keeping your email in perpetual motion on a 
daily basis, so that if they lose the DC you happen to be in, TS, but it 
only impacts a small number of people. If you want the ability to 
recover email that's been deleted or lost in a system crash, then you 
run your email through a (different) company that archives your mail first.

On a side note, I've also had to (at the same time), run a Spam filter 
vendor assessment for a client. Once of the vendors insisted that their 
product was the best, as

"..a recent study showed our service blocked greater than 99% of email".

I queried this statement, only to be given (in a meeting and I couldn't 
take it away with me) the said study, run by a reputable testing lab, 
that did, indeed, confirm that their service blocked 99% of email. I 
asked if it would be better if their service blocked 99% of Spam, at 
which point the meeting ended, and things suddenly rather cold.  I'm 
glad I raised the question, and asked to look at the report, as the 
meeting I was at was the one where the ITO was going to sign the 
contract for a 5 year service..

Steve

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Steve Walsh
RHCE
Vice President / Sysadmin team member - Linux Australia
Networks and Technology - Linux.conf.au 2008