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Reviewing Anti-Spam Offerings

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the eggs-bacon-sausage-and dept.

Joel Snyder writes "Just finished looking into the innards of 40+ anti-spam products at Network World. The biggest, ugliest, and most comprehensive look at this market that's ever been done. Conclusions: lots of great products to choose from at the top (a dozen or more); a few stinkers in the bunch; and it's basically impossible to review Spam Assassin, which is unfortunate."

7 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SpamAssassin? by stupidfoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    RTFA:
    We also reached out to the SpamAssassin community (see "What about SpamAssassin?"), but couldn't find someone who could act as a representative for support and configuration assistance. However, two commercial vendors, Roaring Penguin (on Unix) and NoSpamToday! (on Windows) sent products that exposed their SpamAssassin cores.

    They have a whole page discussing this.

  2. Re:SpamAssassin? by ack154 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I never thought I'd get to use it... but... RTFA jackass. Don't just see a question and post something about it. Answer: http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamsid e6.html

  3. Spam Solution by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Informative

    Easy. A Postfix server running Postgrey and Anvil. Before mail ever hits a mailbox most spam (and a lot of viruses too) are weeded out. It can protect against distributed dictionary attacks.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. bspam also excellent by brw12 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Though it's a small project, bspam is an excellent Bayesian filter for *nix... I tried bogofilter and some others but nothing jived with my qmail/procmail/pine setup as nicely as bspam.

  5. Re:Avoiding spam by Yaztromo · · Score: 4, Informative
    Maybe it's just me and I'm one of the few lucky people in the world, but out of 5 regular email addresses that I use on a daily basis, I rarely if ever recieve spam, and during the workday, watching mailserver logs, the only people in my company getting silly amounts of spam (to me, one or two messages a day is just a minor annoyance) are people who click every popup and put their email addresses in every form available.

    There are many ways in which spammers harvest and generate spam messages, and not all of them require entering your e-mail address into web forms.

    I have a number of e-mail addresses, some of which date back to the early 90's and use daily, and others which are more recent and which I've never used at all.

    My oldest e-mail address was my primary e-mail adddress for newsgroup postings for many, many years. I haven't given or used that address in roughly 2 years now (as I'm using a different address that forwards to this old mailbox), and yet I still get dozens of spam messages being sent to this address daily (all of which are thankfully auttomatically filtered).

    On the other end of the spectrum is my Gmail account. I have never used this account for anything at all. I've never sent an e-mail from it, or used it to register for anything. And yet it too receives spam (all of which Google also does a good job of filtering automatically). An old e-mail account I got from my ISP when I signed up for my first cable modem was similar -- I already had a mailbox and never used that account. I never even bothered _checking_ it, until one day nearly a year later out of curiousity to see how many spam messages it may have received -- only to find the mailbox was filled with hundreds of spam messages.

    I often see messages where the list of recipients was obviously generated by attaching a list of user names to each entry in a list of domains and then sending the results. And who knows how many Windows e-mail worms out there are sending users address book entries back to spammers.

    Best practices can reduce your spam load from certain vectors, but not all of them, making some form of filtering good policy. When even unused mailboxes are getting clogged with spam, however, you know that best practices alone just aren't enough.

    Yaz.

  6. Re:Too bad by joel_snyder · · Score: 3, Informative

    GFI got a horrible review last year. The product they submitted was a pure 'word checker' (i.e., if you've got Viagra anywhere, you're spam) and so their false positive rate went through the roof. They also had some horrible heuristics, such as "if you're not on the "to:" line, it must be spam." My experience is that it was architected for a small office where you can tune it out the wazoo. They have since (I have heard) fixed their product, but they were so heavily burned by last year that they didn't want to come and play this year. I can't really blame them; once burned, twice shy. But we'll never really know, will we?

  7. I don't know how much I trust their conclusions by CerebusUS · · Score: 3, Informative

    The one product that I am familiar with is Barracuda, as we run that where I work. They claim that Barracuda doesn't support SSL for management, which is dead wrong. In fact it's very simple to _force_ the Barracuda to use SSL for this purpose.

    It's only one point, but they make a fairly big deal out of it.