Click Here to Participate

We are doing a survey of users of archiving products (e.g., EMC Legato, Symantec Vault, Zantaz/Autonomy), to see how good the products are in practice. We’ll use the information to produce a Consumer Reports-style comparative assessment.

If you are using an electronic archiving product or service and would like to participate, please go to www.ferris.com/archiving-survey.html. The survey takes about five minutes to complete. We ask you to score the product in areas such as:

• E-discovery support
• Storage management features
• Support for laws/regulations/policy compliance
• Scalability
• Quality of vendor support
• Overall value for money

In return, we will send you a summary of the results.

This is an ongoing survey. Because there are about 15 products under evaluation, we’re seeking ultimately to gather several thousand responses.

… David Ferris

Expanding on: Steve Kille’s recent bulletin about IP reputation. SPF isn’t exactly a “reputation mechanism” — although it can be used to help identify the sender, in order to make improved reputation-based decisions.

SPF, DKIM, and other “sender authentication” schemes help a receiving MTA decide if it knows which domain sent a message. For example, SPF can tell if the sending IP address 1.2.3.4 is authorized to send mail claiming to be from example.com and DKIM can tell if the incoming message was signed by example.com’s private key.

If the receiving MTA knows the sending domain, it doesn’t need to rely on the reputation of the sending IP address, which can be a blunt instrument. It allows domains themselves to have reputations. It’s especially useful for whitelisting known-good domains, so that mail from them doesn’t fall victim to the false-positive problem.

(Another common way of describing SPF et al is: mechanisms to detect forgeries, which amounts to the same thing but in a different context.)

… Richi Jennings