Anti Spam solution

opethdisciple · 13 Dec 2015 at 14:05

Whats the best anti spam solution at the moment?

We run a Linux infrastructure and use Spam Assasin.

However it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job. Our users receiving a ton of spam.

Caged · 13 Dec 2015 at 14:06

Best is probably Mimecast. It's not cheap.

blueboy2001 · 13 Dec 2015 at 21:12

If you want to keep it in house, I've been really impressed with Barracuda Spam Firewall.

Their Linux based virtual appliance offerings are good value, they are very simple to configure and the spam blocking is very good. You can get a 30 day trial for free.

If you want to go external, Fusemail (formerly iCritical) are usually cheaper than Mimecast and their cloud solution and support are good. The advantage of the external providers is they will do hold and replay if your comms or server is down, and they can offer a web interface for users which can be useful in DR situations.

Lanz · 14 Dec 2015 at 00:06

+1 for mimecast, we get very little spam and I rarely have to release any false positives.

the-evaluator · 14 Dec 2015 at 09:47

I don't think Mimecast is quite the product it used to be.

When I signed up about 3 years ago the email hygiene stuff was excellent but as they've been adding more stuff (targeted threat protection and so on) the hygiene has been less effective. We often get very, very obvious spam getting through which support have confirmed isn't being allowed through because of any of the policies we have in place.

I'll be looking for alternatives in a few months.

If looking for a cloud based provider, consider what happens when (not if, when) that vendor goes down. Mimecast had downtime (https://www.mimecast.com/blog/2013/05/mimecast-service-outage-update-for-customers/) in May 2013. Yet despite that their SLA is based on 100% availability.

They also had another issue a couple of weeks ago which delayed emails for a few hours. They're not good at communicating issues and are very quick the update the admin console to say 'Everything's working great!' when they should leave the notifications about the issues up for a few days.

Support can be very hit and miss. Sometimes it is excellent and I'll have a ticket resolved in a couple of hours but often I'll have to keep prodding them to look at it. I have to get the account management team involved more often than I would like.

It's a good product but not the product it once was.