SMTP Gateway Product suggestions

[ryoun1b]

I am torn in my decision to choose a GOOD SMTP gateway products that will do two things:

1) Scan incoming SMTP email for viruses to prevent attachments from harming my Exchange 2K server.

2) Filtering content for SPAM prevention.

The two products that seem to be contenders are:

1) Trend Micro's Neat Suite for MSFT Exchange or
2) GFIMailSecurity for exchange/SMTP

Can anyone lend some pro's/con's about each and if you have experience with both please give me some recommendations on it's ability to filter both viruses and spam.

Thanks!!!!!!

 

[tmckeown]

I started using GFI a few weeks ago, and I have to say it's fantastic. It's been catching 90% of spam and with daily tweaks, it's getting better and better. The program installed on our exchange 2k server easily. No glitch or gotchas. I am real impressed with it. Mail Essentials is around $500 for us. The mail security feature is another 1K for us. That's a bit steep so, we are checking it our a lot before putting down that much cash. Their tech support has been helpful so far, but I really have not needed them much. I find it amazing when a product actually works like the developer says it does. I don't think you can go wrong with the GFI stuff. I'm glad we went that route.

 

[ryoun1b]

How do you set GFI to catch SPAM? I understand from them that it is self managed meaning that the user has to develop their own list. Is this difficult or easy to manage?

Thanks.

 

[tmckeown]

It basically has three ways to catch spam: Black list, Keywords, Headers. Each has it's own settings that can be tweaked. They also have a white list. Names added to the white list will never be stopped as spam. In addition, the have a DNS lookup for spam sites. That part is automatic, you just select which service to use. I started with their basic setup and then tweaked it each day. It caught a lot right away, but spammers are pretty clever, so I would have our people forward spam they get to me. I set up a rule in Outlook to sort my incoming mail. Anything with a FW: goes to my forward folder. I add these senders to the blacklist. I use a programmers text editor (Winedit) to edit the black list. It's an XML file. It's easy to understand the layout. I've been building up our black list for a few weeks now. It has been very effective and easy to use. The white list is the same type thing, with one great exception. When people send email to someone, that recipient is added to the white list automatically. That's a great feature, but can be turned off as well. Between my black list, their ORDB spammers list, keywords and the header checking, we are doing very well with stopping spam. I also turned off DNR in our Exchange 2K server configuration. That prevents a buildup of undeliverable DNRs. Many spammers don't have valid addresses. I know they will clear by themselves after 2 days, but I'm impatient. If they are scanning for servers, I don't want our server to say "Here I am, send more spam". The down side to this is that I have to check the undeliverable messages to let our people know why they did not go out. Currently I have GFI Mail Essential forward all spam to my mailbox to be sure it is spam. People freak around here if they miss any email, so I try to double check some stuff. When people forward spam that got through to me, I find ways to stop it for the next time. I will either add their domain to the blacklist, if it's unique, or I will use key word detection to flag it as spam. It's worked great.
Download their 90 day trial of Mail Essentials. It's painless to install and it doesn't cost anything. It also has no limits, so you can really find out how well it will work for you.
Hope this helps,
Tom