Are our spam levels normal? 1

[DMoll]

I would be interested in people's experiences of how effective their spam solutions are. We use GFI MailEssentials on our Exchange Server. It is blocking about 7000 mails per day but lets through about 30-40 spam mails company wide (40 users) with only about 300 genuine emails. So the worst case is that occasionally a user has maybe 10 spam emails but then many never have any spam at all. We have a minute amount of false positives - about 1 per month.

To me this doesn't seem too bad given the price of GFI but my management are not happy. That's fine but I would like to know if anybody in a similar company environment to ourselves is doing significantly better and even reaching the perfection of no spam at all!

Note that we always keep the GFI product up to date and I try my best to tweak it in response to the various changes in spam.

I would be interested to hear from you - particularly whether externally managed solutions are the way to go in terms of actual spam reduction and not just anti-spam management reduction.

Thanks.

 

[dput]

We also use the GFI MailEssentials product, but we front end it with Spam Filtering on our Firewall (WatchGuard). The combination of the 2 pushes our success rate higher. We average 94-97% of all e-mail being spam. Ocassionaly a SPAM does get through. There are some products that will stop a much higher percentage and give the end user more control of what is "SPAM". It is just what you can afford. If senior management wants better results, I would gather proposals and let them know what they would cost. Was just looking at a product from MX Logic that looks like it would be less than $2.00 per user per month. It is a service. Might be an option for you.

Dan

 

[sleipnir214]

Your milage may vary..."

I work for a public school system. We only provide email addresses to teachers, so we have about 3000 email accounts defined on our mail server. Before my tenure, someone thought it a good idea to publish our entire email directory on a web site, so we once had a spam problem so bad, we actually abandoned a domain name. (It wasn't all that great a loss, it as a ".us" domain name).

On any given day, anywhere from 85% to 98% of all emails arriving at our border are spam: yesterday my antispam system blocked 92% of all messages. I don't have any statistics right at-hand on false positives.



On a related note, did everyone see that Eddie Davidson, the so-called "Spam King" escaped from prison?


Want to ask the best questions? Read Eric S. Raymond's essay "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". TANSTAAFL!

 

[DMoll]

Thanks for the info sleipnir - but what I'm interested in is how much spam still gets through to users inboxes.

 

[gb0mb]

I use a sendmail relay to relay the incoming mail from the dmz to an internal exchange server. I turned on (forgot the exact name off the top of my head) dns resolution of the sender. If the inbound mail is sent from an IP without a domain name it immediately rejects it.

This has caused some issues with people relaying mail to us from some non domain listed server. overall this put a halt to a big part of our spam problem.

Gb0mb

........99.9% User Error........
Ubuntu -- African for I can't install Gentoo

 

[Hondy]

you could try MessageLabs solution, it works for me - I can't remember getting any spam in the last few months at least.

 

[mkrice2]

You could also try the Barracuda. It plus GFI have worked stellar for us. 95-98% spam blocked. We block over 450,000 daily.

 

[airbourne]

The amount of spam that is getting through to you is by far acceptable. You will never eliminate 100%. It's just not possible.

We use a Barracuda appliance and still about 2 spam per user per week (~80 email accounts) make it through. I would consider less than 5 per day acceptable and less than 10-15 per day tolerable. It really depends on the volume of email your server is processing. Anywhere from 1-4% is good, depending on your volume. Some users will get more than others depending on their internet habits (signing up for mailing lists from NEWS, BANK, DIETING, PERSONAL AD websites, etc. will cause a jump in the amount of unsolicited SPAM they recieve). Even registering on a forum can sign you up for SPAM lists if the forum administrators sell your contact infor (or "share" them with "partners" who then turn around and sell your information.)

You can try a service, such as Postini. I've never used MX Logic so I cannot comment on them.

Postini is $3 per email, per year for inbound mail filtering only. So 40 emails would cost you $120 add'l per year. They used to have aliases for circumstances such as employee name change or mailing groups. Aliases used to be free. Postini was purchased by Google, so I don't know if that has changed or not.

 

[dearingkr]

According to your numbers, (7000 blocked, 30-40 get through) you're hitting 99.5% effectiveness.
That's extremely good.

As airbourne said, you'll never get rid of spam completely.


MCSE CCNA CCDA

 

[DMoll]

Thanks for the replies - looks like management want a separate spam filter service anyway. I'm sure it will reduce it further but I think they are looking for perfection. Luckily I am leaving this job anyway so won't have to explain why spam still gets through even after spending more money (yes it would be my fault!)...