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The Linux distillery Open source brings a spam-free lunch
The Linux distillery Open source brings a spam-free lunch | Open source brings a spam-free lunch |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 14 January 2008 | |
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5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
And be wary of upgrading; Symantec Mail Security version 6 supports Microsoft Exchange 2007, but the product came out after Exchange 2007; early adopters of Microsoft’s mail platform had no working Symantec option at the time of purchase. This highlights a problem with proprietary solutions. They are locked in to specific technologies. There’s not likely to be another version of Exchange for three or four years so the company above won’t soon face any problem again with having an unsupported version, but consider that they may opt to change their mail platform in the interim – over to Lotus Domino, say. Now their Symantec Mail Security for Exchange offers no protection at all; they will need to purchase a different version which supports the new platform. This isn’t a Symantec bash, by any means; indeed, Symantec offer good products (while their Norton line is bloated and burdensome) and they are far from alone in being a provider of commercial, licensed, anti-spam products that specifically tie in to a targeted mail server. One philosophy that the free and open source movement has espoused, whether intentionally or not, is to promote standards-based software and this is the key to platform-free anti-spam. Before we get onto that, a case in point about standards is the very argument used against the Firefox web browser, namely that users can find sites which do not load properly under Firefox but yet work within Internet Explorer. The reason is invariably the site has been either badly designed or it has been designed to specifically target Internet Explorer. Firefox prides itself on a very strict and complete implementation of Web Consortium standards; by contrast Internet Explorer is more accepting of coding flaws. On the surface that sounds helpful but it is not; bad CSS renders despite incorrect or missing quotes or brackets. The web page author is not aware of problems and has no motivation to fix them. However, a growing proportion of Internet users will be unable to see their page as it was intended to be displayed – unless every other browser also receives programming modifications allowing them to tolerate the exact same flaws IE will, and with the exact same results. CONTINUED
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