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11 Anti-spam Products Tested

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the filter-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes "When we achieve world peace, that's when we'll get the perfect anti-spam solution. In the meantime, ZDNet has a comprehensive review of eleven of the latest anti-spam products including solutions from BitDefender, Clearswift, CA eTrust, GFI, IronPort, MailGuard, McAfee, MessageLabs, NetIQ, Network Box and Symantec Brightmail."

3 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SpamBayes? by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IIRC, SpamAssassin once properly trained and configured has yet to lose against any commercial or foss spam solution. DSAM is another amazing FOSS spam filter that could go up against the best of commercial products. But as another poster pointed out, FOSS doesn't advertise on their website unlike the 11 products reviewed.
    Regards,
    Steve

  2. Is this for real? by JumboMessiah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When being initially trialled/evaluated we would expect most anti-spam applications to run around 65 percent to 70 percent spam catch accuracy with very low to zero false positives in "default" or "out of the box" configurations. Then, once given the benefit of being "tuned" or "tweaked" and having localised white and black lists applied they should run at about 85 percent to 92 percent

    I don't know about everyone else, but I'd expect a little more out of a product that costs thousands to implement. With a little research and dedication my SA 3.0.1 setup has no problem spanking those numbers.

    I'm also assuming that none of these products produced extremely stellar results. The article never mentions any statistics based upon corpus runs for any of them. This is nothing more than TLA eyecandy...

  3. Re:SpamAssassin by Mowog · · Score: 5, Interesting
    And the media will never give them attention until they [the Open Source solutions] start spending big bucks advertising with the media
    That's not strictly true -- it depends on who the intended audience is. Technology & Business Magazine is (also) a print publication here in Australia, whose audience is primarily IT managers (and therefore businesses).

    Most businesses want to BUY something to fix their spam problem and not try to fix it themselves. There are exceptions to that rule, but by and large IT managers are already busy enough and just want someone or something else to fix their spam.

    I know this because my company (MailGuard) is one of those in the review. And no, we don't spend huge $$$ on advertising with ZDnet; we were invited to submit for the review, as I imagine were all the other vendors. Remember -- there are two worlds out there. Businesses will often recognise and implement Open Source solutions, but businesses also like to engage other businesses to handle non-core problems for them.