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SPAM filter for Exchange 2000 - help deciding

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Zahundas

IS-IT--Management
Sep 9, 2002
19
CA
Hi,

I am trying to decide between the following SPAM filtering packages:

GFI Mail Essentials/Mail Security for Exchange 2000
Trend Micro - Spam Prevention Solution
iHateSpam server Edition

Any pros/cons or good/bad experiences with the above mentioned?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Zahundas
 
Installed GFI yesterday, and so far it's intercepted over 2200 spam emails. Of those, about two dozen weren't true spam and I had to add the senders to the built-in Whitelist, but that was expected.

Installation was a breeze, as is configuration. For a server based solution, it appears to be working pretty well. It still hasn't "learned" yet so the full capability hasn't kicked in. It has Baysian (sp?) filtering capability that takes three days to "learn" from the mail flow, so it'll probably get better.

We're on the 60 day trial, and still in the honeymoon phase, but it seems to be a fine solution.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.
 
We are using GFI Mail Essentials Ver 9.0.

Initially (Ver 8.0) I was not very satisfied with this product mainly because of the list which I had to manually update and also because I am not very satisfied with their tech support.

When they came up with Ver 9.0, it has a feature called "Bayesian Analysis". Baysian filtering technology is an adaptive, `artificial intelligence' technique that is much harder to circumvent by spammers. Since then the system has been doing a good Job. Although I must say, few good e-mail also gets blocked by it and also few bad mail also gets past it.

Good Luck with your decision.
 
Pick the GFI one, it is still the best one around (at the moment..)

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 have been using Antigen for Exchange with spamcure the last few weeks, The spamcure engine works lovely, blocks out 99% of spam with minimal false positives. Only problem is, My exchange server reboots itself during backups with logging showing various antigen services as the cause. They have admitted fault but are clueless at this point on what's wrong and have stopped responding to my emails, I guess because I'm a isolated incident?

Installing GFI mail essentials tomorrow.

01110000
 
I use Surfcontrol email filter v4.7 for SMTP. This version sits on a separate box to the Exchange box and can be situated in your DMZ so your Exchange server can sit on the corporate LAN behind it.

Its got a huge rule set and allows massive customisation including an "AI" agent that can be setup for any custom category of email you choose. I've only just really got round to training these agents.

I like it because I also use it to block all attachments with executable code and to scan for viral code.

Downside is that it does take a bit of work to get it setup right and probably a bit more admin than I'd like it also doesn't handle NDR's very well.
 
I have been using GFI ME 9 for a couple of weeks. It is working well enough though I did run into trouble during installation because my domain has two Exchange servers both accepting mail for the domain. After a few days of confusion GFI support was able to help me solve the problems.
 
I've usually recommended NETIQ MailMarshal SMTP (sits on another server and uses M$ SQL to log everything.) Automatically downloads new scripts to check against as the holes start spelling V!Agr8 funny.

Alex
 
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