EPA (Email Protection Agency) is a reseller for the Email Systems mail filtering services. As managed services settle down, we expect to see a lot more of the larger services being offered as rebadged services through other channels and service providers.
The Email Systems GUI is attractive and well laid out.
The web site requires Macromedia Flash for graphs, which requires a plugin for Mozilla browsers, but it is trivial to install. More complex is the Adobe SVG plugin required for the reports page – this was more difficult to install but Email Systems tell us the SVG reports are being phased out.
In its default configuration, the filters had excellent detection rates.
The quarantine displays all the mail headers and has the useful addition of being able to open individual MIME sections in new windows. But to our dismay, it also happily downloads remote images, which is a bad idea from both a privacy point of view and when you consider the possible risks of IFRAME exploits and even malformed images.
The "last page" link in the quarantine did not work, possibly down to browser compatibility, and the quarantine does not even say how many items (or pages) there are. On a positive note, we liked being able to download the quarantine as a CSV file: handy for offline analysis.
New rules are very easy to create. The interface includes a range of options with a useful webform to select and customize the filters. We were pleased to see the option to pass email based on specific headers, which is a nice touch if you are using products such as the Habeas warrant mark which insert custom headers en route.
The documentation is adequate but sparse, and there is no online help. This could be improved, but the interface is very simple.
We like the option for an email archive, too. Email Systems offers the feature of long-term mail storage, which is managed and administered with a distinct set of admin rights to keep the store secure. This feature was not included in our evaluation account, however, so we did not test it.
