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11 Anti-spam Products Tested
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."
Seems like a glaring ommission.
Where are the OSS products? No Spamassassin?
Some review...
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
I wonder why they didn't mention SpamAssassin. Open Source solutions will never gain the market share they deserve if media never gives them the attention they deserve. And the media will never give them attention until they get market share. It's a deadly cycle. Note: Open Source does not inherently make a product worthy of market share.
Why not get the real ultimate power?
... unlike the other products reviewed, doesn't advertise on ZDNet.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Between Spamassassin and Sendmail using a few blacklists, I get almost no spam. Based on my logs from the past week, I've blocked nearly 500 messages. Not bad when you consider I run a small server with few users.
You are not the customer.
Why not just use thunderbird, it already has pretty good anti-spam capabilities in it to begin with and it's free and open source. I will admit I only installed it a few hours ago so I haven't been using it very long. The reason I installed it was because Eudora for OS X was very slow and for some reason was deleting my newest email every time I tried to download new email. Thunderbird is extremely fast, has better features, no popups, and is free. So far I have encountered no bugs, except some of the spam filtering features were a little unintuitive so I had to try them all out to see what did what.
Alternately, check out MailScanner for one-stop mail sanitization, virus checking, and spam filtering.
How can this list be considered even remotely complete? What about the personalized Louisville Slugger, the noble etherkiller and (for your Tier 1 types who work in volume) the 1200-bung-per-hour-rated Jarvis Sow Bung Dropper?
Oh, wait, this is a review of anti-spam products, not anti-spammer products. Never mind.
We use Xwall where I work. It's $349 and you get free lifetime support and upgrades. And with the new greylisting feature 99% of all spam is stopped.
It seems that many people these days now just look to pick up a pretty box at the store to help deal with spam. However, anyone who does this must not get important e-mail. I, for one, don't want my e-mail being filtered by some proprietary application like mcafee with limited configurability and disclosing details on how it works for "trade secret/IP" reasons. If it's an ip blocking service, I want statistics and to know how IPs get on it. If it's something statistical, I want to know exactly what it does. It is very dangerous to let your correspondence get picked apart by a "black box."
...and serious admins aren't exposing Windows to the internet to accept mail. But that's ZDNet for you....
Some people just go to the last page anyway :-)
Software winner: Symantec Brightmail, for ease of installation, configuration and administration as well as an excellent user interface and detailed "live" graphical reporting it would be hard to surpass these features.
Managed Service winner: Network Box, if security is a concern then Network Box has the bases covered, if availability and redundancy are your preferred choice then a trial of either MailGuard or MessageLabs may be on the cards.
Appliance winner: IronPort, strong security, redundancy and recently developed ease of installation with the new GUI make this appliance the choice in this review. For those with a tighter budget then perhaps one of the McAfee WebShield appliances may be considered and are still very worthy contenders.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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...
Lots of free things mentioned like SpamAssasin.
My company uses mxlogic.com. $1.25 per mailbox per month. At 60 people, that's WAY cheaper than my time to administer anything. I havn't heard a peep of a complaint from users after switching. Before were using a device (eSafe by Alladin systems). It was taking up to an hour/day of my time. And it wasn't free.
Just remember to include admin time when working out 'free'.
I wrote the original sendmail milter interface to Brightmail that they derived their milter software from. We still run my milter because I've added additional options over time; Brightmail includes an SDK that you can use to interface to custom setups easily.
11 Anti-spammer Products Tested
Product :BitDefender v1.9 for MS Exchange2003
Interoperability: 2.5 Futureproofing 3 ROI 4.5 Service 4.5 Rating 3.5
Product Clearswift MIMEsweeper for SMTP 5.0
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 4 ROI 4 Service 2 Rating 3.5
Product CA eTrust Secure Content Manager v1.0
Interoperability 4 Futureproofing 3.5 ROI 3.5 Service 5 Rating 4
Product GFI Mail Essentials v10.1
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 3.4 ROI 4 Service NULL Rating 3.5
Product IronPort C30
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 4.5 ROI 3.5 Service 4 Rating 4
Product MailGuard
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 4 ROI 4 Service 3.5 Rating 4
Product McAfee SpamKiller & WebShield
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 3.5 ROI 3.5 Service 4 Rating 3.5
Product MessageLabs AntiSpam Service
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 4 ROI NULL Service 3.5 Rating 4
Product NetIQ MailMarshal SMTP 6.0.3.8
Interoperability 4.5 Futureproofing 4 ROI 4 Service NULL Rating 4
Product Network Box Internet Threat Prevention System
Interoperability 3 Futureproofing 4 ROI 5.5 Service 5 Rating 4
Product Symantec BrightMail AntiSpam 6.0.1
Interoperability 4 Futureproofing 4.5 ROI 4 Service NULL Rating 4.5
It looks as though Network Box Internet Threat Prevention System did the best. Several items have NULL in a category beecause the editors did not have enough information to rate the product on in that area. This post brought to you by Centum because my average charachters per line were too low. You know how silly that is?
Philosophy.
The other noteworthy point of the last page is the absolutely ridiculous statement of, "Please note that these decisions were not based on accuracy testing."
I'm sure everyone is just amazingly psyched about an "ultimate" anti-spam guide that makes no effort to determine if the products they are reviewing (let alone proclaiming as the "winner") actually stop spam.
Of course, I guess this kind of article is developed to benifit CIOs with no technical experience, who just want something to tell the IT department to install. (Thus: price and ease of installation are far more important than it actually doing what it is supposed to.)
What's a sig?
They also ignored any kind of freeware, not only Linux ones, SpamPal for example.
Also, their reviews were pretty shallow, I would expect at least to know how am I to connect to this spam filter, there are numerous ways, some better, some worse.
Setting Up a Spam-Filtering Mail Gateway For Microsoft Exchange Using Fedora Core 1, Postfix 2.0.19, Amavisd-New and Razor2 http://tinyurl.com/3khzk
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Hi All,
:-)
Love all the comments !! And despite popular belief I did not get my 2 year old son to write the review.
Reading through them it seems to me there is definitely a few misconceptions that need to be cleared up, so hopefully this may sort a few things out. Then again it may not!
Before we begin down this path I appreciate your patience in getting through this abnormally large post, but it is better to deal with the comments on a whole rather than one by one.
1. We are the RMIT Test Lab, based in Australia, we are a totally separate organization from the magazine who is one of our clients, they contract us to perform three independent technology reviews every month on products that they invite the vendors to submit. The RMIT Test Lab will have been performing independent magazine reviews for 16 years in January 2005. We have certainly produced a hell of a lot of words over that time. For more information on the RMIT Test Lab hit www.testlab.rmit.edu.au The vendors don't pay the Lab one cent to have their products tested for the magazine reviews.
2. For all you Open Source buffs out there, you know who you are! The magazine creates a list of what technologies will be tested approx. six months in advance, one and a half months before going to press the magazine issues invites to various product vendors to submit product(s) to us at the lab for testing, this is generally accompanied by a "scenario" which is set by the magazine to ensure that the vendors stick to certain criteria and submit products of a certain caliber/type and not all eight products that they may have in their inventory which fits into that review category. Therefore it is the magazine who invites the vendors, not the Test Lab nor the reviewer. Basically we have no control over which vendors are invited to submit and at the end of the day every single vendor could not possibly be reviewed, there will always be some who cant submit, wont submit, have not been invited or don't have Australia as a target market. So don't blame us for not including Spam Assassin or any of the other 100's of commercial and open source Anti-Spam solutions that are out there. Also note that a review we have recently completed and submitted "E-Mail Clients" for the next edition of the magazine contained several Open Source products, and a review we have just commenced "Internet Browsers" also contains several Open Source products too. So before pulling out the "Paid for Results" and "Advertising Driven" and "Open Source Bashing" comments think again and take a look at a few of the other reviews we have performed.
3. We are fundamentally IT engineers who design and execute testing frameworks, methodologies and create reports, we just happen to have a very very small modicum of writing ability, we are by no means trained journalists "out for the scoop" or trying to generate traditional "media hype" around varying technologies. We report things as we see them. We are also very experienced in testing these technologies; in fact the majority of the work the lab is contracted to perform is private testing for corporate clients and vendors/manufacturers/developers. Therefore we will not "test" where others try unless the test will provide valid worthwhile results that we will stand behind happily. The fact that we are not journalists means that the Magazine's editorial staff have their work cut out editing our reviews while still maintaining our individual writing styles and the basic concepts of what we are trying to deliver, sometimes it is successful sometimes less so. An example for you is that the review we submitted on Spam was 7,049 words long (25 A4 pages in Word, or Writer, with screen shots and images). And that does not even include the features table or the overview table. The space available for that edition of the magazine was less than 3000 words. Therefore 4000 words had to be lost. We don't get to see the finished product until it is published. Overall I personally feel that the review turned out