Ferrari Mailing List: Re: [NFC] Spam Filters & Cellular Repeaters?

[Steve Jenkins (steve]

Hi, Charles!

Properly administering an MS Exchange server is a black art. I consider
myself, and my two business partners (one of whom is Listmeister and
Tech-Alpha-Male Steve Cook) more than "handy" around computer admin, and
even we don't mess with that ourselves.

We outsource our Exchange management to AppRiver (http://www.appriver.com/)
- I believe you can use their SecureTide service if you insist on running
your own Exchange server in-house, or you can do what we do and just
outsource the entire Exchange hosting problem and stop losing sleep over it.
The return on investment for the time saved by no having to manage Exchange
makes it a no-brainer for us. Our time is far better spent managing all our
other servers and business processes.

In every other case I can think of, we are a "roll your own" company. We
build and manage all our other technology processes in-house. But for
Exchange, and for the price and quality level that these guys can do it for
it, running it in-house just didn't make sense. Could we do it? Yeah. Rumor
has it that we're pretty smart when it comes to computer stuff. :) But does
it make sense for us to do it? No way. Not for the prices they charge. And
you know how frugal I am - if there were a way we could do it as well or
better for cheaper, we would. We've been using them for a little over a
year, and haven't had a single hiccup. I've only had to call their tech
support once (during initial setup to verify some settings), and they were
both knowledgeable and helpful.

I don't know if they give existing clients a free month or anything if we
refer somebody, but if you decide to check them out, please name-drop us
just in case. :)

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Perry [mailto:charles [at] carolina-sound.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 6:49 AM
To: Steve Jenkins
Cc: The FerrariList
Subject: [Ferrari] [NFC] Spam Filters & Cellular Repeaters?

Wonder if I could tap the list's expertise outside of cars for a few
minutes.

Last year our company bought a server (Dell Poweredge 1900, I believe,
running MS Server 2003) which is doing our domain hosting and Microsoft
Exchange e-mail hosting. We're a pretty small group - about 20 employees
and about a dozen full-time terminals with occasional laptops. This is
the first time we've hosted our own e-mail, as opposed to letting our
ISP do it. Over the course of the year our spam has gotten completely
out of control, like a lot of people's I'd guess. I get about 200 spams
a day, and most of my other people have the same problem to a lesser
extent. The IT people who set up the server for us did not implement any
spam controls as they said they had not found a solution which did a
good job without being overly intrusive. If I remember correctly,
Exchange has the ability to reference someone's spam list for doing
simple filtering, but I couldn't use that because it would automatically
kill messages with lots of recipient names, which interfered with some
other e-mail based lists we use at the office.

Do any of you know of or use a good spam solution that can work for our
entire enterprise on a MS Server/Exchange 2003 box? Obviously I don't
want any consumer-level crap like McAfee, but other than that I'm open
to suggestion. Don't care if it's hardware or software as long as it's
easy for a non-IT guy to administer and reasonably effective.

Second problem. We are about to move into our new headquarters building
and have found that the cellular signal inside the building is unusable.
It is a steel frame building with metal roof & walls, so it makes a
pretty effective Faraday cage. However, the building we're moving out of
had the same construction and no issue with cell signal. Has anyone
successfully used any sort of cellular repeater where we can put
something inside the building to boost the cell signal to a usable
level? The signal seems fine if you're outside the building, but not
inside.

Thanks!

-- charles




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                          Charles G. Perry IV

Carolina Sound Communications           (843) 571-4488
1941 Savage Rd., Suite 200G             (843) 571-4492 fax
Charleston, SC 29407                     www.carolina-sound.com


       "The problem with doing things right the first time is that no

            one realizes how difficult it was."

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