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Intel Pulling the Plug On McAfee/MX Logic Anti-Spam (mcafee.com)
New submitter d4nimal writes: Intel today announced that it is killing the MX Logic/McAfee/Intel Security spam protection service (PDF). The last date of service is January, 2017. This comes on the heels of numerous outages and a general rise in user and admin dissatisfaction. Intel purchased the service as part of its McAfee acquisition in 2010. MX Logic was bought by McAfee less than a year earlier.
Intel owning McAfee made as much sense as a firearms company buying a blood substitute firm.
When I first heard this years ago I wondered if Intel was trying to strangle Microsoft OS's from both ends: crappy processor performance combined with bloated AV software that used up any cycles not currently being used to apply the latest updates or ship the user data back to the mothership.
Now that John McAfee is a declared candidate for the Presidency of the US, it was a clear conflict of interest on Intel's part.
And even if it wasn't, it's a nice troll point.
From my recent experience with any McAfee product. Intel did not do much to improve quality of that company. They must have bought McAfee for something? But so far it has not proven to be a good fit for Intel.
So all the people who were abandoned by Google when they discontinued the Postini service and then moved to McAfee/MX Logic are again looking for a life raft.
Anti-spam filtering is tough, which is why everyone would like to outsource this thankless task.
We are going to end up with 2 dominant mail systems at this rate. It's going to be a Google Apps or Office365 (Exchange online) duopoly for mail servers.
Anyone who would buy anything from McAfee given his incredibly dubious track record gets exactly what they deserve.
Apparently Intel never heard of the phrase "due diligence", or else they just figured, "Nah, John McAfee would never screw us over..."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If the product is fixable so the outages don't occur, that should be done. Killing off a product seems like laziness on Intel's part.
I worked for MXLogic/McAfee/Intel for just short of a decade. I was hired by MXLogic when they had 100 employees. I was there when McAfee bought them, I was there when Intel bought McAfee. All I can say if that I'm sad to see something that I worked and believed in for so long and become successful, then run into the ground. Today was prognosticated by many former employees of that office.
Now Intel needs to produce their own version of this informative video explaining how their customers can remove the MX Logic/McAfee/Intel Security/Partridge-in-Pear-Tree product.
I believe that Treasure, Carmella and Sasha are available for consultation although Bianca and Diamond have left the IT support industry.
Years ago before Mcafee bought them, and intel bought mcafee the mxlogic\spamsoap service was great, actually it was better then great.
It was highly reliable, highly configurable, and quite a cheap way for an organization to put someones else in-front as the public face\first line of it's mail servers\mail filters. I recommended them highly back in those days, and if you did have a problem you could talk to someone there and they would resolve it, plenty of times I chatted with folks at MXLogic making suggestions for configurable options etc and months later they showed up in the product.
It's been a two or more years since I've used the service (though I talk with people who's orgs still use it) but ever since Mcafee got involved seems to have gone down hill a bit, but not to the extent of needing to be killed, it's still a very usable and very simple to use service and I'd bet the problems are very fixable if they are just having capacity issues. Why are they killing it? Is it just not profitable, or not profitable "enough" for Intel? If it's not making 'enough' they should just sell it off, probably someone out there who would want it so long as it isn't losing a sh1t ton of money.
Their spam stuff works well enough but their portal is underinvested (unusable on an iPad which sometimes is the quickest thing to hand for a track and trace) and they have dns resolution issues occasionally. They partnered with Dell Messageone for continuity but Dell spun it off and the partnership was dissolved, which is annoying as having all our hosted messaging products at least nominally linked was useful. Symantec theoretically have a continuity product as part of their archiving solution but they don't promote it worth a shit, had a hell of a time trying to research it. One idiot sent me a pdf for the Messageone product I already had.