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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."
You're going to find that 90% of the "mail security"/anti-spam solutions that are worth anything are devices of this ilk - turnkey appliances that run some bsd derivitave and generally don't care what mail system you run inside. This is really the way you should be looking anyway - these devices are purpose built to do nothing but process mail through whatever filters you configure them to use. You're going to see much greater effeciency and performance from a device like that rather than doing anti-spam with something that plugs into exchange. When (on average) 70-80% of the email your domain receives is junk, do you really want it getting into your bulky exchange infrastructure? Weed it out beforehand!
Most of the current crop of anti-spam devices work at least fairly well - obviously there are differences in some of the filters they support and the user interface; some will also have easy integration with other mail security options like encryption, etc. Another feature you might find is an Exchange plugin, though it seems easiest and much cleaner to manage spam from the client side via a web-based interface as opposed to attempted thick mail client integration.
Some examples:
CipherTrust IronMail
Baracuda (Look at your slashdot banner ads!)
Tumbleweed EMF
BorderWare MXtreme
IronPort
I believe all of these (with the exception of Tumbleweed) are some combination of *nix/bsd, mysql/postgres, apache, and custom smtp engines, all rolled up in a nice little easy to manage package. I'm partial to IronMail (mostly because I was a CipherTrust SA in a previous life), though the price point is a bit high. The MXTreme's are decent, and have BrightMail available as an add-on in addition to their built in filters. I've also heard good things about Baracuda, and the pricepoint is much lower, but I've not used them myself.