Appliances are cool - but are they the best?

GFI software might have a vested interest in convincing you that buying their software is better for you than getting an anti-spam appliance or using a hosting service, but it's worth a read of what they have to say anyhow. On appliances, they make the interesting observations that:

If the appliance fails, company is down until a replacement arrives

and

Does not give any flexibility to the IT administrator

The case against using hosted anti-spam is a bit thinner: it boils down to a loss of control, but Internet email is hardly a secure end-to-end system in any case, even if you run your own mail servers:

Inability to take decisions and implement immediately

See their full articles "Software vs. Appliances" and "Software vs. Hosted Services" for their breakdown of the costs and benefits of each approach.