SourK
12-28-2004, 10:14 AM
I'm not an expert on Anti-Spam solutions but I am certainly focused on the right thing when it comes to overall performance....
I have been trying different Anti-Spam products since they came strong into the market over the past few years. GFI (much tweaking required), Brightmail (works but costs way too much), SA or SpamAssassin (freeware, tweaking, tweaking and more tweaking) on the software side and I've also tried appliances such as Barracuda (<--no comment?), Ironport (uses Brightmail and costs a bundle) and Ironmail (<--again, no comment?). I've tried free products and products that cost an arm and a leg to implement. Let's face the facts, they all claim to be the best but where is the balance?
When you take into account the needs of a real network admin or IT admin, it comes down to time and money. No one who truly is a champion of network administration has the time to become a SPAM expert when you are supporting more than 25 users. Heck, if you are receiving more than 1000 email a day this fits you as well. Tweaking an Anti-Spam system for your entire organization uses countless hours of your valuable time and not to mention your co-workers or assistant admin etc. Do the math, if it's free and your spending 10-20 hours a month or quarter tweaking, so it ain't free. If you paid for it and your still having to tweak it, you got scammed my friend.
Despite the hype and all the sales guys calling we dumped em all. I went to SCMagazine and reviewed what they had to say. I found a product that is made in Israel that was voted best bang for the buck. They gave it 5 stars ***** for value and 4 stars **** for features and it didn't win the overall award either. The product is called PineApp Mail-SeCure. http://www.scmagazine.com/products/...amp;type=review
It is not much to look at but we demo'd it and it worked like a charm. It only captures about 97-98% of SPAM which is still good and it does have a very accurate false positive filter, less than 0.1%. The unit we tested had a lot of cool features such as RBL's, BK list and WHT lists. It also has some features I don't know if I'll use but look cool like URL filtering, HTTP filtering and file extension blocking. You can even shut down MSN and ICR's.
During our demo I let it take on about 500 email users. It comes with an unlimited user node meaning I could load as many users as the unit could handle and it doesn’t cost anymore which was cool. It also has F-Secure anti-virus that comes free for inline scanning integrated in the unit. Needless to say that is what we use currently and when we had trouble with the unit a few months back they replaced it for free and gave us a redundant unit to keep in house as a backup. O yea, we use Notes and it works great with it taking the load off the M-server. Also works great with Exchange since it is an appliance.
We paid less than $5k for our unit and there are no per user fee's. We only pay a small 5% of original price, fee each year to have continued support, version updates which are uploaded automatically, virus definitions updates, hardware replacement, engine updates etc.
Here is the webiste, isn't much but I highly recommend taking a look. http://www.pineapp.com
:cool:
I have been trying different Anti-Spam products since they came strong into the market over the past few years. GFI (much tweaking required), Brightmail (works but costs way too much), SA or SpamAssassin (freeware, tweaking, tweaking and more tweaking) on the software side and I've also tried appliances such as Barracuda (<--no comment?), Ironport (uses Brightmail and costs a bundle) and Ironmail (<--again, no comment?). I've tried free products and products that cost an arm and a leg to implement. Let's face the facts, they all claim to be the best but where is the balance?
When you take into account the needs of a real network admin or IT admin, it comes down to time and money. No one who truly is a champion of network administration has the time to become a SPAM expert when you are supporting more than 25 users. Heck, if you are receiving more than 1000 email a day this fits you as well. Tweaking an Anti-Spam system for your entire organization uses countless hours of your valuable time and not to mention your co-workers or assistant admin etc. Do the math, if it's free and your spending 10-20 hours a month or quarter tweaking, so it ain't free. If you paid for it and your still having to tweak it, you got scammed my friend.
Despite the hype and all the sales guys calling we dumped em all. I went to SCMagazine and reviewed what they had to say. I found a product that is made in Israel that was voted best bang for the buck. They gave it 5 stars ***** for value and 4 stars **** for features and it didn't win the overall award either. The product is called PineApp Mail-SeCure. http://www.scmagazine.com/products/...amp;type=review
It is not much to look at but we demo'd it and it worked like a charm. It only captures about 97-98% of SPAM which is still good and it does have a very accurate false positive filter, less than 0.1%. The unit we tested had a lot of cool features such as RBL's, BK list and WHT lists. It also has some features I don't know if I'll use but look cool like URL filtering, HTTP filtering and file extension blocking. You can even shut down MSN and ICR's.
During our demo I let it take on about 500 email users. It comes with an unlimited user node meaning I could load as many users as the unit could handle and it doesn’t cost anymore which was cool. It also has F-Secure anti-virus that comes free for inline scanning integrated in the unit. Needless to say that is what we use currently and when we had trouble with the unit a few months back they replaced it for free and gave us a redundant unit to keep in house as a backup. O yea, we use Notes and it works great with it taking the load off the M-server. Also works great with Exchange since it is an appliance.
We paid less than $5k for our unit and there are no per user fee's. We only pay a small 5% of original price, fee each year to have continued support, version updates which are uploaded automatically, virus definitions updates, hardware replacement, engine updates etc.
Here is the webiste, isn't much but I highly recommend taking a look. http://www.pineapp.com
:cool: