Sophos, you've lost the plot!

Matt,

What's ur issues? I'm not support but I've been using Sophos and other Next Gen Firewalls for about 5 years now. Maybe I can help.

Matt (yeah my name is the same as yours. What can I say. It's a good name.)

Hi Matt,

Problems with Sophos Puremessage for Unix. We lost a gateway and cloned another VM to recreate it. After changing the config to now be the new gateway, the quarantine manager broke and left us with a bunch of emails stuck in the quarantine. Should be relatively easy to resolve but plagued by silence from Sophos.

Support on this platform is extremely limited - I think we're only talking about a handful of people throughout Sophos actually know the system at a supportable level. Support are notorious at clinging onto cases for all packages which bugs me. That is, when you get your first answer and are assigned to an engineer, you stay with that engineer even if they are out of office go on vacation or whatever, it doesn't get handed over or anyone else step in to assist. Some of the responses I've had while chasing this have been clearly poor and it should have been easy for my team to handle without me needing to get involved.

Matt

Matt,

I would suggest not using Puremessage at all and only using the Sophos UTM as an email gateway. You can just purchase the "Email Protection" license if needed. However "Endpoint protection" will greatly protect your exchange server itself. Never allow your exchange server direct access to the untrusted interface. If you have a mail relay that is external to your network, you can configure UTM accordingly.

Matt

Matt,

I know what you mean about support from Sophos. Support works from the other way as well. I found a major DOS vuln in UTM in the past (it is fixed now) and the initial email was replied within minutes. However the key engineer that I was working with went on vacation so the problem went into the Sophos "black hole" and email communication was lost. However they released the next update with a fix so I dropped it. However I never really got the credit.

Matt

Matt,

If all we were using was exchange, I'd probably head down that road but it's not. Our gateways servie our global operations and much of that is in the 'nix world much of which doesn't have any Sophos involvement in at all.

Matt

Matt,

It's just bonkers that a major company doesn't have anyone immediately step in when an engineer goes out, is sick, has to go away on a course or whatever. ALL calls they are currently on should immediately be reviewed by another engineer. There could very well be critical issues that need a reply. In our case, a gateway servicing around 3k messages a day was down without any access to quarantine and it isn't smart that they just leave it in limbo. Even raising another support request should have kicked someone into action but that didn't get answered and still remains unanswered now.

As for customer care's response - what on earth they were thinking, beggers belief. If they're licensing management only then they should call themselves 'licensing' not 'customer care'. If I have a problem with support, I need someone else to step in and mediate and that's what customer care is all about. With no account management available, who else do I call? They have a long way to go to lift themselves back again up in my books.

Matt

Matt,

Sophos will protect any email server as an external facing relay. I have mine configured for internal exchange servers. However UTM Email Protection is an "SMTP gateway". It's not just for exchange. It can be configured for any OS type of internal email server; Linux or MS. Just as long as they are configured to route outgoing mail to UTM. Probably as a "smart host".

Matt

Matt,

UTM though is just Puremessage appliance with the root interface locked out. We modify sendmail scripts to handle prioritising messages i.e. bulk marketing has a low priority over general mail. With a locked out UTM, I'd be putting another gateway in just to handle that. Makes no sense.

Back on point though, the issue is with Sophos's support black hole and lack of service around chasing that. Problems with PM will be posted in the appropriate forum.

Matt

Hi Matt,

First of all, let me apologise for the problems you've had in getting a response and resolution to your recent problem. You seem to have been unfortunate in being the victim of a number of slip-ups, particularly with cover for an engineer on vacation not falling into place. I believe you now have a satisfactory response, and that your new Sales Account Manager has been in touch.

The Support management team have taken a close look at your less-than-stellar experience, and we'll learn from that study. I know you'd rather have a smooth Support experience than an apology, but if there's anything else you need in this case, feel free to contact me direct via SophosTalk's Private Messaging.

Best regrads,

spike.

Thanks Spike.

Yes, Sophos customer for > 15 years and I've had some ups and downs during that time. I'm hoping we all learn from this and it's not repeated. Most frustrating to just have no one at all talking to you even a junior technician explaining that someone's away would have worked. It cost my key support guy for our gateways several hours of wasted time looking himself over scripts and configurations to figure out what someone there should have known in minutes simply because we had days without a response and messages stuck. In the past, I've just fired a 'go kick someone' at our account manager but since Sophos no longer deal direct, that seems to have lost it's lustre now and my last A/C manager leaving without a follow up from her or someone taking over made it even more frustrating.

Sigh, grumble, head up, rant over.....move on :)

Matt