[BlueOnyx:19938] Re: New user question about spam

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Jeff,

> I'm new to BlueOnyx, but not hosting servers - I've been running my own for
> over 10 years now.  My current CP is no longer supported, but was VERY
> solid, simple, and robust - so I'm in the market for a replacement.

Welcome to BlueOnyx!

> BlueOnyx.  I see there's a PKG I could purchase to get it (or something
> simlar) integrated, but I have mixed feelings about that (if free works...).

I'm the only one of the developer team who's working fulltime on
BlueOnyx (and Aventurin{e}). And even that is mostly from the hand to
the mouth on a very modest basis. With BlueOnyx you get fixes mostly
right away. If it's broken, I'll fix it. ASAP, no delay. It just gets done.

But the thing is: Like everyone else I need to pay bills and have a
family to take care of. So - together with Greg Kuhnert - we publish
around 200 commercial add-ons for BlueOnyx to address the needs of those
who want more than the basics. These PKGs are available for purchase
with and without updates (30 or 365 days) and we also offer them for
rent at a really modest price which is way below what a straight
purchase would cost.

See: http://shop.blueonyx.it/blueonyx.html

There are also bundles available that further reduce the price of
individual components and starting with buying more than one item volume
some interesting discounts start to apply.

See: http://shop.blueonyx.it/blueonyx/bundles.html

Yes, BlueOynx could have SpamAssassin integrated out of the box. That
only requires updates and rebuilds every year or two or three. Clam AV
is another matter. A new version of that comes out every 1-3 months. And
then the RPMs and PKGs for that need to be rolled up for six different
versions of BlueOnyx. We try to automate the building of such updates as
much as possible, but before release these updates need testing. The
more complicated an extra is, the more testing it requires. So each time
Clam AV is updated it's a days worth of building, packaging and testing.
All things considered: Once a year is over, you've had me working on
that fulltime for 4-6 weeks in that year alone - just to keep it up to
speed and to prevent it from breaking.

The AV-SPAM also aggregated a lot of extras over the course of the +10
years it's been around that go way beyond a stock SpamAssasin, Clam AV
and Milter-Greylist install. Like our unique Milter-GeoIP, which (aside
from GeoIP based SMTP-checks) also offers email traffic monitoring, user
and vsite email traffic limits and automatic suspension of accounts that
appear to have been compromised through brute force password guessing.

All of that is tightly integrated into the BlueOnyx GUI with
administration pages for server admins, vsite admins and end users, so
that they can configure the settings that will apply to them.

In the +10 years that the AV-SPAM has been around it has seen constant
development, learned new tricks, had interesting new features added and
never got stale. After the frequent PHP updates it's the most
maintenance intensive extra software we offer. Hence I think the price
for it is entirely justifiable.

Of course: You can always grab a SpamAssassin or Webmail somewhere and
can install them yourself. We don't discourage that. But at the end of
the day any purchase (regardless how big or small) you make in the
BlueOnyx shop helps us to provide you with a better BlueOnyx in the
future and keeps the project afloat.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber