So I'm now trying to figure out what to do with my Xeams installation...  I need some guidance...

I'm using Xeams as a pure spam-filtering and reporting engine as a front-end to multiple flavors of mail servers... Exchange, Zimbra and Domino.  The rest of the features are completely useless to me:

- I only use one global profile for filtering,
- I only create users because I have to in order to get the reporting (no one in my org uses Xeams as an actual mail server),
- I have no use for clustering, 
- the message archive is nice but everyone saves every email anyways these days,
- the AD integration is pointless as I have 3 different mail platforms.

I have no problem paying for software, but not when I can't get much value out of it.  For spam-filtering and reporting functionality, it's not worth the money.

Now, if you gave me a way to set up Xeams like this with a more realistic pricing plan, I would be more than happy to send you money (just not the Enterprise pricing):

- Junk mail filtering (either via SMTP proxy or SMTP store-and-forward)
- Message repository and retention capped to 90 or 120 days (NOT permanent archiving)
- User daily summary reports (just like we get them now)
- create users for spam filtering only and NOT for mail server functionality (ie: no rights to log in for IMAP/POP3/SMTP privileges, just enough to get daily summaries and release quarantined emails)
- ClamAV functionality would be nice for some but is not useful in my circumstances (I have edge servers that do antivirus scanning before it gets anywhere near Xeams).
- single spam filtering profile - instead of separate profiles by domain

Most of the other capabilities in the software I would call "enterprise" functionality - which I'm already paying a hefty price for to Microsoft, Zimbra and IBM already.  When I first loaded Xeams, it was a very simple junk filtering platform with nice reporting and some features to allow it to be a small mail server.  Over time, it's ballooned to a monster.  I get it, some people don't want to pay for Exchange, Zimbra or Domino and Xeams would work for them - but I don't want to have to pay for a 4th platform just to get good filtering.

Perhaps there's a third licensing model that sits between the Community and Enterprise editions - or stands on its own for people like me.

I do like the filtering and reporting - I think it's one of the better ones out there - but at this point it comes down to cost.  We're both in the same boat from a money perspective.  However, from what I'm seeing on the forums, unless Synametrics is willing to really look at what the market wants, they might end up laying off developers anyways.

So, what's a guy to do now?

My thoughts exactly