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Scenario: My company is going to move all the mail accounts from the current local (and ancient) POP-only provider to gmail, via google apps for work.

Current status: Currently we are using a firewall/proxy/spam filter appliance named nethsecurity box (basically an old ipcop based solution on a small x86 embedded board) which filters all mails downloaded from our local provider's servers.

Issue: Such an appliance is going out of resources these days because the company has grown a lot in the last 5 years, but basically resource shortage is due to heavy usage of clamav and spamassassin. If required, we need to replace it with something more powerful (that is more cpu and ram)

The question: does it worth to have an additional layer of spamd/clamav if you have gmail as filter? Is there any report about comparative capabilities of clamav + spamassassin vs. gmail filtering? I would avoid to add an additional layer of checks for a really neglectable increment in filtering performance (read: capability to remove additional unwanted material without relevant increments in false positive).

Never tried this and I would like to know if I can save some bucks, keeping the current appliance just for firewalling tasks.

thanx a lot!

M

matteo nunziati
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I wouldn't put a local spam/virus filtering appliance in front of gmail. Google's spam filtering isn't perfect, but the additional stuff you'd catch is pretty much guaranteed to not be worth the cost of maintenance. The worst part of gmail, by all accounts, is the sometimes overzealous nature of its filtering, and that won't be fixed by an additional filtering appliance in the chain, anyway.

womble
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  • even if this is the only available answer, the contents have been confirmed by other local solution providers, making this the right answer. – matteo nunziati Sep 14 '15 at 10:15