Anyone here outsource their spam solution instead of having software sit on your exchange server and you keep updating the rules database just have a 3rd party do it?
The change over is easy (just an MX pointer change + replication time). They run the email through a two phase anti-virus queue and then a combination of Rules, keywords, and pattern matching for SPAM. Also, all of the management of the Quarantine and Black List items is web-based so you can verify and submit items for inclusion and exclusion.
The cost is per seat and not steep at all.
Computer Associates has eSCM which resides on a seperate computer (can be inline between Firewall and Exchange Server or not), includes Anti-virus, Spam, and HTTP protection. Not too bad to set up and so-so intuitive.
I've researched both and if it was my decision I would go with the Sprint solution - less headaches for me, no setup and no real implementation hassles.
Personally, I would never ever do that.
Most, if not all, spamsoftware will catch a valid email.
If this is at your own site, you still have control. Offsite this becomes more difficult.
That, and the fact that your mail is handled by an external internet company, is reason enough not to do that.
If you invest in the very decent filters from
you have full control and even some nice additional features, at a lower price and full confidentiality.
Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC![/sub]
I agree with marcs41. Outsourcing means another company is handling your email. I work for a law firm and that is a big no-no for confidentiality reasons. Because of this, we are forced to beef up our internal spam filtering.
FWIW, we just started using eDox as a 3rd party spam filter. They use Brightmail (the $250,000 software package..) and the combination of their filtering and what we had in place previously (Mailsweeper for SMTP) is catching probably 90-95% of all the junk. They do not stop anything, they simply add "[suspected spam]" in the header which makes it easy to create a rule to snag it as it comes in to your inbox.. So far 0 false positives after 2 weeks. I'm hosting 4 domains and the price wound up around $3 per person per month. Much better than me spending an hour a day on our own filters IMHO. We were getting buried both in spam and in false positives. Worth looking at if your compliance folks can deal with it.
3$ does not sound like much, but for 1.000 users you already end up at 3.000 a Month.
That is just a plain rip-off to me. The software does the same job for 1 as for 1.000 users. Even with a discount it is absurt.
Marc
[sub]If 'something' 'somewhere' gives 'some' error, expect random guesses or no replies at all. Please specify details.
Free Tip: The F1 Key does NOT destroy your PC![/sub]
We've used Surfcontrol (up to v4.6) over here and I personally don't recommend it. The built in "Riskfilter" did just "ok" trapping around 65-75% of incoming spam (this was updated via FTP on a nightly basis on a scheduled routine). That left us to create our own rules which worked with some effectiveness but are very hard to maintain (keeping up with the spammers). Daily, I would spend from 1-4 hours analyzing messages that slipped the filters, adjusting the rulesets/keywords to compensate for the changes, testing the effectiveness of said changes, and general maintenance of the system. Even then, we were only trapping 90-95% and when you consider our daily traffic is VERY high, that meant that 1,000 plus messages were slipping the filters a day. Not to mention, that we had all kinds of problems with the filtering queues filling up & slow processing which resulted in mail delays (even on a brand new 3.0 GHZ/1GB RAM server). In the end, we went with a hosted solution....Postini. It was more important to our attorneys to have constant mail flow with as little spam as possible and SurfControl just wasn't providing that for us.
Postini isn't perfect by any means but the amount of spam that slips the filters is probably around or under 1% per day and many of those get through because the person doesn't have their filters at the correct levels for the type of spam their getting. They have a large law firm clientele (and some of the biggest at that) so that made us far more comfortable switching to them.
So, if you have a small organization, an on-site solution may be manageable for you but in my experience, the larger you are the more sense it makes to go hosted. As long as you can get a trial period on either one, you should be able to find what works for you.
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