Product Details
Product Rating
Advanced Spam Defense
Collaboration Suite
Email Filter for SMTP
i:mail
iHateSpam for Exchange
Immunity
MailMarshal
MailMeter for Exchange
MailSite MP
Mailstream Content Manager
Message Inspector
Messaging Suite
MIMEsweeper for SMTP
ModusGate Secure Email Management Gateway
Policy Patrol Email Filter Enterprise Edition
PureMessage for Windows/Exchange
NetIQ's MailMarshal SMTP is hard to beat and is the deserved winner of our Best Buy award. Its ease-of-use, features and management are excellent, and while it is designed for a pure Windows environment, this does not really take away from the product as a whole. Our first Recommend rating goes to SurfControl's Email filter for SMTP. It demonstrated fast mail processing and the best detection rates in the test. The second Recommended award goes to MailMeter, because its extensive reporting facilities enable administrators to fine-tune email filters elsewhere in the organization.
Email filtering (2005)
The battle against spam starts at the gateway to your business's network. Robert Jaques tests the latest technology that can catch it before it gets in
Think of email and, inevitably, spam rears its ugly head. It has gone from a minor annoyance to being one of the biggest problems faced by companies. With spam a high percentage of all email, it is an issue that cannot be ignored.
The problem is not merely one of clogged email servers and issues with the associated storage space, but also one of manpower. Each spam incident reduces productivity because they must be manually checked and deleted. There is clearly a need to block these emails at the gateway.
But in all the rush to protect our companies from spam, it is all too easy to forget the other, potentially more damaging, uses of email.
If your employees are sending offensive messages to other people, your company could be held liable. Even if it does not get to the legal stage, just think of the harm done to the firm's reputation – a rude email sent by an annoyed employee can have a profound effect on the way your business is perceived.
Then there is the problem of email and company secrets and files. What is the point of having a secure network if employees can email out protected information?
Then there is the problem of email viruses. These will damage PCs and sap your bandwidth, so they must be blocked before they enter your company.
Obviously, these threats do not fall under the banner of spam. They're different problems that need an altogether different approach – which is where email content filtering steps in.
In a similar way to web filtering products, email content filters monitor ingoing and outgoing emails and blocks those that do not meet an acceptable use policy.
For this group test, we have selected 16 products designed to enforce corporate email policies. Some detect and block spam, while others enforce company-specific acceptable usage policies.
To test the software, we started with the anti-spam facilities. These are notoriously difficult to test. Times have moved on from the simpler, administrator-generated rules, where a list of keywords would block spam. Spammers have wised up, and now use misspelled words, images, even large blocks of text to evade these simple systems.
Spam detection has also moved on, to the point where you need a dedicated detection engine, as you do for anti-virus. We are pleased to report that the technology has come along enough that all of the software we looked at detected our sample set of spam, aside from the occasional rogue email.
But you cannot expect your detection systems to be perfect on the first day out, which is where learning comes in.
We scoured each product's feature set looking to see if the spam engine can be improved upon. Feedback systems, where you can manually reclassify incorrectly identified mail, are essential. The more you feed back to the system, the better the scanning gets. For the products that let rogue emails through, we passed them back into the system and were pleased to find that they were blocked next time.
Detection of spam is not the only way to go, though. It is often better to block an email before it enters your system.
We were looking to find out what other methods the software introduces to block spam, such as whitelists, blacklists, and realtime blocking. Realtime blocking, in particular, is one of the most interesting tools. Using lists, such as those provided by Spamhaus.org, you can set your system to block all of the currently known spammers from sending you email.
Detection is one thing, but we also paid careful attention to management. Once you have found your spam it is important to know that your software can be configured to deal with it.
As we mentioned earlier, spam is not the only problem, and software to lend weight to your corporate policy is very important. In these cases, it is purely a management task, so we looked at what each software package could offer.
In particular, we were interested in being able to create rules looking for specific phrases and text to prevent, among other things, company secrets being released and offensive emails being sent. We were also interested in anti-virus integration and other rules, such as blocking harmful attachments and compressing large attachments.
Again, the actions presented once emails have been found were important. For example, the ability to quarantine an email and notify staff is important for the smooth running of this kind of software.
Finally, we looked at reporting in the software. This is particularly important during a new system's infancy, when it is more likely to have false positives and need fine tuning. You will have a much easier time if you possess the correct reporting tools.
With this wide range of products, we realise that not all of them will suit everyone. However, we have tried to look at as many features as possible to find the best products for a secure email service to enforce your company's policy.
