Exchange Compatible Spam Filters?

DamienMcKenna asks: "At work our license for Symantec Brightmail is coming up for renewal and I'm looking for alternatives that will cooperate with Microsoft Exchange 2003. Brightmail hasn't worked consistently since we installed it last year, has a low success rate, the client plugin has been very unstable, and it takes up far too much server resources for what it does. Given that many of the appropriate software is not available for trial (you have to base decisions off their marketing materials), does anyone have recommendations on what to use instead? It must be Windows-based (UNIX/Linux/BSD is out of the question right now), and should have an easy to use administrative interface since not all of the IT staff are very technically minded. A working plugin for Outlook for client-level configuration would also be appreciated."

Comments

MailMarshal

[nmb3000]

The company I used to work at used MailMarshal for their spam/virus filtering. The interface was pretty good, but there was no Bayesian filters, nor client-side plugins (though I don't really thing they are that much of a bonus). It was pretty easy on resources; the Poweredge server we had never seemed to have much of a problem, and it was running IIS and MSSQL at the same time (it was a smaller business).

This was several years ago, and all those things, including a web interface and quarantines were supposed to be in the next version (and they've gone through some two or three versions since then).

Might be worth checking out anyway.

ASSP

[GrigorPDX]

ASSP is an excellent, cross-platform, open source mail filter that is quite popular amongst my long-suffering Windows mail server admins. Perl-based and platform-agnostic it might be what you're looking for.

Re:McAfree GroupShould with SpamKiller add-on

[perlionex]

Since we're on the topic of commercial distributions of SpamAssassin:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CommercialWind ows

...and I know you're looking for easy-to-click distributions, but on the off-chance you (or somebody else reading this article) is looking for information on simply running SpamAssassin on Windows:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingOnWindows

Why not use Exchange IMF?

[YU Nicks NE Way]

The IMF which ships as a part of E2K3 SP1 and later works well, and has the advantage of being free with Exchange.

IMF is the answer. Free, from MS, and effective

[malakai]

It's free, it's part of Exchange but shipped after the product.
See: here.

I used to fool a dedicated linux box and SpamAssassin. I tested out the IMF when it came out and for the spam my users see, it beat out how our SpamAssassin was configured.

It also integrates with exchange very closely and uses the new Spam Confidence Level header stuff.