Re: anti-spam software

[Michael Young <Michael.Young () RIT EDU>]

Almost three years ago now, we evaluated several anti-spam products for
our environment.  We ended up selecting Symantec Mail Security (formerly
Brightmail) and have been very happy with it.

We initially looked at the features of many products to narrow the field
down.  We then tried out Brightmail, MailFronter, IronMail, PureMessage,
and PreciseMail.

Brightmail won hands down.  Low user maintenance, false positive rate,
directory integration and language support were key requirements.  Users
have the ability to manage their own white/black lists, as well as the
languages they will accept.  With the directory integration, we also
have the ability to provide customized policies to individual colleges
or departments on campus that run their own mail server.

We have ~17,500 users.  In the past week, 95.5% threats of 12,527,861
connections/messages were removed.  Our users typically report less than
100 messages per day that have gotten past it, and there are less than
50 false positives per day.  Less than 2,000 of our users see messages
in their quarantine, and very few feel the need to maintain a
white/black list at all.  We have three standalone appliances, which
we're considering moving to the vmWare ESX virtual version when the
hardware comes end of life.

The only downside is the relative cost, but it is extremely effective
and very low maintenance.

Michael Young
RIT

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Maria Iano
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 3:25 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] anti-spam software

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I am hoping to pick your brains about commercial anti-spam solutions.

The Math Department has roughly 1000 user accounts and currently uses  
SpamAssassin, as well as many of the spam filtering options in  
postfix such as header and body checks and DNS blacklists. Our users  
mark messages as spam and we feed them to the Bayesian database for  
SpamAssassin. Nonetheless, a lot of spam still gets through. So we  
are looking into commercial anti-spam software. Has anyone else gone  
the route of purchasing a commercial solution? If so, how did it work  
out for you? Has anyone else compiled a review of the different  
choices and how they compare? If so, I would love to see it. If you  
know of any commercial anti-spam providers that offer deep education  
discounts that would be good to know also.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Maria Iano
- --
iano () math umd edu
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