Best corporate spam filter?

electech98

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2002
Messages
1,800
Hey guys,

As the network specialist/administrator here at my credit union, I have the responsibility of researching out the best corporate spam filter as we have been receiving increased complaints of users receiving spam. Several of us here use SpamBayes spam filter, but that is only client-side filtering. Instead of setting this up on every single computer we have (70+ right now, plus we are opening up a branch in the spring which will add about another 20, with other branches in the planning stages), I thought it best to go with a corporate spam filter that resides on our Exchange 2000 server, running on a Windows 2000 Server machine.

Of course, when I want to research something like that, one of the first things I think about is the [H]ardForum. I am assuming that some of you guys have experience with this, so I'm gonna ask for your opinions. What have you guys used for corporate spam filtering, how much does it cost, how does it perform, and why is it the best in your opinion?

Thanks in advance for your help...it is much appreciated!

Jeremy
 
We are out sourced by small to mid sized credit unions to do IT consulting and for the price and functionality of SPAM/ANTI VIRUS blocking Mdaemon is great. www.altn.com

No matter what email server you run just setup mdaemon as a gateway and it will take care of everything for you.
 
RBL lists and proper mail checking have left me with almost no spam. The occassional 1-2 emails from legitimate domains does happen to get through.
 
I'm using GFI Mailessentials(version 8, there is a version 9 out now), and it does a decent job. The nice thing about it is it's cheap, less than a grand for 100 email box license, and there are no reoccuring fees. An increasing number of picture spams have been getting through lately though. I'm hesitant to tweak it much more, as it may start grabbing legit email.

It hardly ever gets false positives though and gets over 95% of our spam. I'm using the bayesian filter, blacklist(a small list of really bad spam domains), and header checking. 99% of the spam gets caught in the bayesian filter though.
 
My job uses SurfControl's Email filter for SMTP. We are pretty happy with it.
 
Fint said:
My job uses SurfControl's Email filter for SMTP. We are pretty happy with it.

I tried that a while ago and it was terrible. I'm guessing it's gotten a lot better than it was. We still use SurfControl as a web filter, and it's ok. The main problem I've had with their stuff is it seems quite disorganized, and their support is the same way.
 
1) if possible, install spam/ AV filtering on a separate box (preferrably as a gateway). This offloads utilization from the exchange server and is generally considered good practices.

2) Check out brightmail by symantec as a solution. If you like managed solutions, check out postini.com and messagelabs.com
 
Feetdude said:
Seconded. Ours paid for itself within the first couple of days.

I checked that out yesterday, and so far it seems to be the least expensive of the solutions, and has gotten rave reviews.
 
Feetdude said:
Seconded. Ours paid for itself within the first couple of days.


Amen to that.

Our business relies on e-mails coming in from unknown recips, various domains, and all manner of "odd" languages.

We were using an Exchange based software, and it marked damn near everything as spam.

This barracuda is great, it catches a TON of spam, and lets a lot of legitimate (yet seemingly suspect) mails through without problems.
 
Feetdude said:
Seconded. Ours paid for itself within the first couple of days.

Thirded. Barracuda is the best, bar none. :D Our law firm clients spam was cut 90% with just the generic spam settings out of the box and their exchange servers SCSI HDDs are no longer thrashing 24/7 dealing with the spam and qued email.
 
electech98, depending on your budget, you can take a cheap PC, toss in a RAID1 subsystem, and throw SpamAssassin (free) on it, and you'll have a very cheap version of what the Barracuda box is (a 2u server running a slightly customized version of SpamAssassin and a GUI). Of course, with the Barracuda you get that nice pretty GUI, and someone to hold your hand and shove you updates, as well as a phone number to call if you have problems.
 
at our place we use mail foundry.
so far it has been absolutley amazing.
its an entirley different device and i dont know how much money youre looking at spending. but it was worth it for us and has been doing a great job.
 
Fint said:
electech98, depending on your budget, you can take a cheap PC, toss in a RAID1 subsystem, and throw SpamAssassin (free) on it, and you'll have a very cheap version of what the Barracuda box is (a 2u server running a slightly customized version of SpamAssassin and a GUI). Of course, with the Barracuda you get that nice pretty GUI, and someone to hold your hand and shove you updates, as well as a phone number to call if you have problems.


This is what we used to do before we got the Barracuda.
It's a good idea, but it's really time consuming to maintain & update, which is why we went with a commercial product. (barracuda also adds per user quarantines, which is nice)


If you do go this route, though, be sure to add in ClamAV (or another scanner) for added protection.
 
Fint said:
electech98, depending on your budget, you can take a cheap PC, toss in a RAID1 subsystem, and throw SpamAssassin (free) on it, and you'll have a very cheap version of what the Barracuda box is (a 2u server running a slightly customized version of SpamAssassin and a GUI). Of course, with the Barracuda you get that nice pretty GUI, and someone to hold your hand and shove you updates, as well as a phone number to call if you have problems.

Not a bad idea. I might go along with this, since my exchange server is really getting hammered all the time. I wonder if I can get away with using some older hardware so i don't waste a fast machine.
 
That's what we've done. To cut back on costs we moved out students (150 users) to a postfix email server that acts as a gateway to our exchange server for the staff. The postfix server runs spamassasin, amavisd, and clamav. It's not perfect and I could spend more time tweaking the spam filtering, but it's not worth the time. Yes spam still gets through, bit it's 10% of what it was and was pretty cheap to put in place.
 
We don't have anything yet but after looking over all the options we have decided to go with a Barracuda device. Even with a small amount of users it ends up being cheaper than most other products out there when you look at the costs over a 3-5 year period.
 
I have two canit boxes running and it does a great job. Extremely cheap to implement for smaller offices (I think each machine I run costs $250 a year)

www.canit.ca
 
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