Anti-Spam software to install on a SMTP Gateway Server.

wasc · 14 Jun 2008 at 13:21

We are starting to outgrow our current anti-spam software on our servers. Can anyone suggest an anti-spam product that will install on a Windows Server (either as a standalone product with it's own SMTP engine built in), or as a product that "plugs in" to Microsoft's IIS SMTP virtual Server.

Our Network is as follows;

1) We have 2 x Windows 2003 based servers in a datacentre which are the primary and secondary MX records for approx 50 domain names (belonging to customers)

2) These servers recieve email for our customers, spam and virus filter the mails, then route them to the appropriate customer based on the domain name of the email. This way customers lock their firewalls down to recieve mails only from our two servers.

From 1 and 2 above, you can see we provide a similar service to MessageLabs for example.

zetec452 · 14 Jun 2008 at 14:56

Is Windows a must? You can buy products like Spam Titan, Mailscanner etc for Linux in which would scale and perform much better. Perhaps also consider appliances such as MailFoundry?

I also assume that using a third party wouldn't be acceptable? Opals MailController is pretty decent as a hosted service.

Biffa · 14 Jun 2008 at 16:04

What did you already outgrow?

If you have to stick with Windows then Mailwasher would be my reccomendation. If you can however I'd look at turning your mail routers into Linux or BSD boxes and running SpamAssasin or one of the industry standards. You can also buy appliances that have it all built in with a web interface to make it less of a hurdle to jump if moving from a primarily windows based environment.

But Mailwasher www.mailwasher.net rocks for windows

Nikumba · 15 Jun 2008 at 19:31

The other good one is GFI Mail Essentials, this is not a bad product but needs to be trained though to get the most out of it.

Kimbie

tbz_ck · 16 Jun 2008 at 09:59

I went from a similar setup to a hosted solution with MessageLabs. Before that we had a TrendMicro solution installed on ISA as a plug-in.

Its no where near as resilient or feature rich as the ML solution. Also they worry about servers and downtime. All I do is check over the rules and reporting now. Much simpler.

I'm a big fan of in-house IT but for email and web filtering you would be hard pushed to try to get me to bring that back in house now I've experienced both sides.

Dangerous · 16 Jun 2008 at 20:51

We use Smoothwall and it took a bit to get setup but now works like a treat! We were getting 5,000+ spam emails sent to us! They all get RBL'd now

ricky1981 · 16 Jun 2008 at 21:02

tbz_ck said:
I went from a similar setup to a hosted solution with MessageLabs. Before that we had a TrendMicro solution installed on ISA as a plug-in.

Its no where near as resilient or feature rich as the ML solution. Also they worry about servers and downtime. All I do is check over the rules and reporting now. Much simpler.

I'm a big fan of in-house IT but for email and web filtering you would be hard pushed to try to get me to bring that back in house now I've experienced both sides.

MessageLabs might be resilient but it's certainly not feature rich compared to other managed service providers out there that offer full DR capabilities, better integration with Outlook, etc etc. Also you have to wait for or request changes to be made rather than being able to make them yourself in realtime. We moved from MessageLabs a couple of years back and our new MSP is far better

tbz_ck · 16 Jun 2008 at 21:14

ricky1981 said:
MessageLabs might be resilient but it's certainly not feature rich compared to other managed service providers out there that offer full DR capabilities, better integration with Outlook, etc etc. Also you have to wait for or request changes to be made rather than being able to make them yourself in realtime. We moved from MessageLabs a couple of years back and our new MSP is far better

So who are they???

I'm interested !!

Also Price per user per month please?

ricky1981 · 16 Jun 2008 at 21:23

Company called Mimecast, they store 180 days worth of our email and have a plugin to outlook so if our exchange server goes down then outlook talks direct to their servers and we can still send/receive emails as well as accessing the 180 days worth of old ones. Everything else is about the same as MessageLabs (including cost) but any changes are made immediately and they also don't charge us extra to add domains which we do a lot, so that keeps my boss quiet.

They do have a full archiving option but we've not gone for that (yet).

J1nxy · 22 Jun 2008 at 17:52

Symantec Mail Security either on SMTP, Exchange or as a nice appliance I've found to be pretty good and the appliance can deal with some pretty scary amounts of mail an hour.

Sp00n · 22 Jun 2008 at 19:43

We use Sophos on our hosted solution, seems to do pretty well as my boss has added in some fleshtone mods as well as a few other things.

CraigN · 23 Jun 2008 at 08:55

I use messagelabs atm and would not recomend them.

We have had demos and pricing from Mimecast and there email continuity does look good.

morfmedia · 24 Jun 2008 at 17:30

MailMarshal has been good for us.

topher · 25 Jun 2008 at 19:08

using mimesweeper 5.2 for smtp by clearswift... has been stable for the last couple of yrs.

Mikey · 25 Jun 2008 at 20:40

Forefront is the area I'm interested in, they hosted filtering solution.

ricky1981 · 25 Jun 2008 at 20:43

I presume you mean Microsoft's offering that they acquired by buying Frontbridge, if so then I would avoid it like the plague. Even those people I know who get it free as part of their Enterprise Agreement have ditched it due to the woeful support.

Mikey · 26 Jun 2008 at 08:08

MMM interesting..

The others I've used have been Black Spider and they were good, but only cater for the larger businesses etc.

I'm looking into other options for a friend at the moment as he's on a SBS 2003 server with a global pop3 collection.. Which is crap...

TheKnat · 26 Jun 2008 at 09:20

topher said:
using mimesweeper 5.2 for smtp by clearswift... has been stable for the last couple of yrs.

Used Mimesweeper in the past in conjunction with Symantec anti-virus (has a decent mimesweeper plugin). Did used to get bogged down a bit, but it wasn't on a very powerful server. I liked it because it was nice and simple to install and configure and keeping it up to date wasn't bad at all.

Current company uses Messagelabs and although its nice not really worrying about it, its not as good to use. As far as I can tell it can't even do things like adding a disclaimer onto the end emails.