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i was in a similar situation. ~50 users, gfi mailessentials. the software is bad -- you have to get away from it. there are too many bad things to list. try following the support forum for a month or so, and see how much progress gets made..

i moved to vamsoft's "orf filter". this cuts out about 98% of the spam at the MTA level, as god intended. (gfi accepts all mail, period, and then backscatters NDRs out into the world.)

i left gfi in place for awhile after installing orf and used it strictly as a categorizing filter, moving everything to the users "junk e-mail" folder.

eventually i replaced gfi with spamassassin for windows (http://sawin32.sourceforge.net/), an exchange event sink to score the messages before they were accepted (http://www.christopherlewis.com/ESA/ExchangeSpamAssassin.htm), and the mailshell event sink to move tagged messages to the users junk folder (http://www.mailshell.com/mail/client/oem2.html/step/exchangeplugin).

aside from vamsoft, which is extremely reasonable in price, these are all $free solutions which work incredibly well. orf blocks most spam at the MTA. anything that makes it past is categorized by spamassassin, put in the user's folder, and it becomes the user's problem. the users manage their own email, without anyone else looking at it. better for them (privacy), better for me (don't have to deal with it). the change was essentially transparent for the users; they only noticed that they were getting less junk.

i still follow the gfi support forum, but it's mostly just to chuckle. i'd love to share some of this with the folks who are struggling with the software, but any post that suggests a different, non-gfi solution is quickly deleted -- i understand they need to try to keep the rats on the sinking ship, but the censorship it pretty hard to stomach.

anyway. hope this helps.

For our clients we use ASSP http://assp.sourceforge.net/ plus mailshell exchange plugin http://www.mailshell.com/mail/client/oem2.html/ste p/exchangeplugin. they are both free programs and have eliminated our spam problems including image spam. We use the RBL, LDAP lookup and other features of ASSP to reduce the amount of email coming in, then use the spam filtering in ASSP to mark spam as such and then use mailshell to redirect the spam into a "junk-email" folder in each user's inbox. the users can then check once in while to see if there are any false positives. ASSP is updated regularly and "learns" as it goes. works great for networks with up to a couple hundred users (haven't tried it on anything bigger yet).

Mailshell http://www.mailshell.com/, a commerical offering, has in the past offered limited (10MB) accounts with throwaway e-mail addresses. It will accept any e-mail to whatever@yourname.mailshell.com, and you can approve or reject any such e-mails. I've been using it for years very effectively. I don;t get anything for the plug; it's just a very nice service.

53% said "Any unwanted email sent by companies from whom you have purchased something before."

44% said "Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."

and my personal favorite, fully 33% said "Any email that you don't want."

...and who wants to guess whether people who consider anything they don't want to be spam are OVERrepresented in AOL's membership, or UNDERrepresented?

53% said "Any unwanted email sent by companies from whom you have purchased something before."

44% said "Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."

and my personal favorite, fully 33% said "Any email that you don't want."

...and who wants to guess whether people who consider anything they don't want to be spam are OVERrepresented in AOL's membership, or UNDERrepresented?

Right, but what was their n value? Where did they conduct the survey? Did they include a variable mix of people? Were their surveys limited to a particular geographic region or cultural group?

I can't seem to find the survey on MailShell...anybody having better luck? I did a domain search through Google but no luck.

Not challenging the accuracy of the survey outright, but it would certainly help to have a link.

I use a service called Mailshell. It lets you use a email@myaccount.mailshell.com email address, so I know who sells my info. The big surprise? Most everyone is pretty good about it. I was getting spam from a kazaa email adress, so I told Mailshell to automatically dump those messages in the trash, and I never see them. It's a great service.

If you don't have your own domain, you can set up a free Mailshell account.

• Spam Gourmet
• Spamex
• Sneakemail
• Mailsehll
• Emailias

Briefly, I'll explain how they work in theory. After signing up with a disposable email service, they give you a disposable email address that you can, for example, enter into forms. Mail sent to that disposable email address gets automatically forwarded to your email account of choice. But here's where they supposedly come in handy. You can sign up for a different disposable email address everytime you fill in a web form. If you start getting spam, you can look at the disposable email address the spam was sent to and you can do 2 things: (1) cancel the disposable email address so you no longer get spam sent to that address; and (2) you know who gave out your disposable address and you can take whatever action you deem appropriate.

This seems like a cool product, in theory, but I haven't seen anyone with real world experience with these services. If anyone here can describe their experiences, it would be greatly appreciated.

Services like Mailshell are great, because when you get spam from "realvideo @ myaddress.mailshell.com", you know exactly who spammed you and you can yell at them, and if you keep getting spam you can just throw away that disposable address.

in answer to #2: use mailshell. Of course, you'll be getting ads from them periodically, and any links sent to you through their service get rewritten to run through their frames (much like hotmail's web interface). But it's nice to know where spammers are getting your address from, makes it easy to filter spam out.

If this service could actually identify my preferences and let me know about things I care about, rather than just spam me with anything they can think of, I would love to see it.

How many of us rushed to see the Lord of the Rings or Phantom Menace trailers? Wouldn't it be great to be informed about such things as soon as they happen, as long as you don't get a ton of other crap?

I still think it would be better to have an intelligent agent that represents you finding these links for you rather than a marketing engine pushing the links to you, but, frankly, there's virtually no economic incentive for someone to build such an agent and every incentive for the marketers to send you their links. In fact, over time, I think marketers who actually do meet our needs will be the ones who win out, and untargeted spam will fall by the wayside.

There are already services that let you give each person with whom you correspond a different email address, thus letting you see who you can trust and eliminate those you can't. As these kind of services become ubiquitous, indiscriminate spammers will begin losing money, while smarter marketers, who actually (gasp!) tell us about products we care about will succeed.

Reading the article, it sounds to me (of course, it's marketing hype, and only time and experience will tell) like this might be such a service.

Wasn't there a slashdot article fairly recently about useful marketing versus spamming?

This is why I use mailshell. I have only recieved one spam so far to bounce-slashdot@smitty.mailshell.com, for instance, and these are easy enough to filter out. Of course, you don't get this service for nothing - mailshell sends you their own spam, but it cuts the ratio down considerably, and you can see where spammers are getting your address from.

http://mailshell.com

Will give you all the addresses you will ever need. Sneakemail is more difficult to use since you need to return to the site to generate an address, but mailshell allows you to generate them on the fly...

It's just easier, and more effective, to wear slippers than try and carpet the world.

Bye MAPS, it was unpleasant being blocked by you, forced to use my ISP smtp servers, disallowed from operating my own deliveries. John Gilmore is right.