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Two industry insiders debate the merits of their anti-spam approaches.
Yes, by Tim Ghiu
Appliances are a much better choice than software for spam protection because they address the broad range of security threats facing large companies, small businesses, service providers, and educational and government institutions. Deployed at the edge of a customer's network, gateway appliances provide the most efficient, easy-to-manage approach to solving spam problems by offloading the existing mail server and addressing security threats before they enter an organization's network.
Customers want effective spam products - products with proven high catch-rates and zero false positives. Appliances pre-integrate a variety of e-mail security technologies into one, purpose-built unit to get the best spam accuracy, with no impact on a customers message network and e-mail service reliability Combined security features help customers get better overall protection and simplify the IT administrator's life. Appliances can be deployed in minutes, compared with hours or days with software-only approaches.
Even with all spam technology being equal - regardless if it's software-based or an appliance - appliances let customers deploy protection more quickly and take advantage of built-in optimization for performance and reliability currently unattainable with software on general-purpose servers. Furthermore, software-based approaches have inherent vulnerabilities when deployed on general-purpose platforms. Operating systems such as Solaris and Windows have widely known susceptibilities to viruses and hacker threats that make them vulnerable to increased attacks. Appliance-based products...