I have been thinking a lot lately about email management and spam fighting.

For my personal email, I use a setup based on Postfix, RBL and WL, grey listing, and DSPAM (by the way, you can find unofficial packages of current development version in my personal repository).

To better train DSPAM, I have removed all other filters (except some very basic controls at SMTP time), and I am very happy of this setup (grey listing delays receipt of email, which I am not very satisfied with, and relying on third-parties RBL is also not the best thing imho). This lead however to much more mail in my DSPAM quarantine queue.
I will hence re-enable more advanced filters at SMTP time once DSPAM bayes are large enough.

I have also played a bit with SPF, and configured my DNS server for my main domain to use it. It now passes the recommended tests. However, I haven’t implemented SPF checks in my Postfix setup.

For work, we rely on a (very old) MS Exchange setup, which is about to be replaced soon by a newer MS based solution. The costs for this replacement is quite high for a small company (about €7,000 including the hardware, the required software licenses, and the costs for setting this up by an independent worker during our summer closure).

I have hence tested Google Apps Standard Edition with one of my domains. I am always very much impressed by Gmail, which is really fast, seems reliable and easy to use. I haven’t tested it carefully in “work conditions” though (ie. using MS Outlook client for calendar sharing etc.), and the cost of the premier edition is €40 per user and per year, which means €1,600 per year for 40 users, ie. it would take more or less 4.5 years to reach the cost of our replacement server. Considering the current server is about 10 years old, I am wondering if Google would really be an alternative (other factors would also play a role, like our low quality DSL connection, 10 years for a mail server seems to be much too old, considering we cannot run any good anti-spam software on it etc.).

Note that an opensource solution was not considered, nobody could administer it (this is not my function in this company).

SaaS (Software as a Service) seem to be the future of software (this is at least what major companies in this sector tend to say, like Microsoft, Adobe, Google to only list some examples), is it already mature enough for small companies largely depending on their email like us?