Survey: Spam Filtering Solutions 1

[MichiganRon]

It's the same growing problem that every email administrator has been facing recently...SPAM! In light of the recently signed (pro-mass marketer) legislation, I wanted to reopen the discussion on anti-spam solutions.

I'm looking for the following information:

[ol][li]What version of GroupWise do you use?[/li][li]Approximately how many users does your system contain?[/li][li]What solution(s) are you using?[/li][li]How much success have they had with the product(s) you're using? On a scale of 1-10 (ten being completely satisfied), how satisfied are you with your current solution?[/li][/ol]Any other information you might think is pertinent to this discussion would be helpful too.

Okay, here goes:

[ol][li]We use GroupWise 6.0 SP3 but will be upgrading to 6.5 SP1 next week.[/li][li]We have approximately 200 users.[/li][li]We don't really have a SPAM filtering solution at this time. We are running GWAVA 2.5 but only use it for virus filtering.

Last year I tried to get the heuristic engine in GWAVA configured to slow the influx of spam but I found that it was completely sucking my time away and we abandoned it.

We're going to try out the junk mail handling features of 6.5 to see how well they work. In the mean time, we're open to trying other solutions, like SpamAssassin, but haven't made any decisions yet.

We've also recently instructed our users to start "opting out" of the emails, where available. My boss started doing it a couple months ago and claims that the amount of spam that she gets has been dramatically reduced.[/li][li]Since we currently don't really have any anti-spam solution in place, I'm sure that our users would give us a 0 on a scale of 1-10[/li][/ol]Your input to this discussion is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Ron

We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are. -Me

murof siht edisni kcuts m'I - PLEH

 

[MichiganRon]

P.S. A star for you, FarOut!!

We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are. -Me

murof siht edisni kcuts m'I - PLEH

 

[FarOut]

Ron,
Thanks for the info on combining the two lists. But I think you will find that Barracuda does not really put any significant delay on delivery. Doing one of my archaic tests, which consisted of sending an e-mail out of our system to one of my personal e-mail accounts, with a 10meg attachment. And then having my personal account auto forward back to me, I saw no significant degradation on turn around time. But your idea does make a lot of sense. Why go to two stores when you can get everything from one!
Thanks

FarOut
V-Peace-V

 

[ITsmyfault]

GW 6.5.1
The following combo is working well for us:
1. Mailsweeper for SMTP acts as an internal relay which runs Sophos A/V as well as checks all mail for presesnce of executables, language, etc. This stops lots of stuff, but is limited (content filtering) They lic per user, so we use multiple servers for resiliancy. They also cache mail if the server is down for maintenance and protect it from attack since nothing can go directly to our mail server. We generally have one for inbound and one for out which is a backup for inbound.

2. We also signed up for the eDox service. $3/month per user.. and no admin OH for my staff. Life is good! They run Brightmail (probably the best anti-spam solution going). They block nothing - they tag mail with [suspected spam] in the subject.. I let this through our mailsweeper preferring instead to have a client level rule which routes this tagged mail to their 'junk mail' folder (set to autodelete in 1 day). eDox has had an exceptionally low false positive rate (maybe 1 piece in 4 months?) Maybe 2-3 a day get through both systems to my inbox.. Mailsweeper is stopping over 1000 a day gross and each users junkmail folder has about 100+ pieces per day in it (another 2500 pcs).

GW6.5 gives you the ultimate option if you can upgrade to it and convince users to use it: blocking based on your address book. If they're in the book, they get in. If not, they don't. A PITA for the user to admin perhaps, but extrememly effective. I have a couple users that do this and they're very happy with it.

 

[BigShyBear]

Took over somebody elses network in December, 150 mail users. Groupwise 5.5, Trend Micro Spam Prevention System 2.0 running as a relay on an computer that sits between inside our firewall, between our firewall and our mail server. We get about 4000 mail messages a day. The Trend Micro Spam Prevention System was deleting about 2200 a day as Spam. Based on sampling I estimate that it let through about 300-500 spam a day that it could not identify as spam. The SPS has an incredibly small false positive rate- about 1 mail message every 2 days - all mailing list items. Late February I reconfigured the firewall to use the Spamhaus.org SBL list. From that day on the Trend Micro Spam Prevention System was deleting about 1200 messages a day as Spam. Still getting about 300-500 false negatives.
I would NOT recommend the Trend Micro Spam Prevention System, the reporting functions are abysmal.