Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 - Tuesday, June 10, 2008 15:01 - 0 Comments

Comparing the best Exchange anti-spam solutions

Comparing Exchange spam software

Here is a short look at Exchange anti-SPAM solutions. Spam filtering is vital to a network. Gateway, or SMTP filtering is the safest and fastest way to accomplish this. One of the easiest things to do this is to use Realtime Blackhole Lists, or RBLs. After RBLs, a few add-on products are discussed which can increase system security and reduce SPAM

What are RBL Lists?
These lists contain a list of IP addresses that are widely known to as sources or relays of SPAM. Filtering eliminates these messages as though they had never existed. One popular such list is the MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System) RBL, which contains thousands of entries. More information concerning RBLs, and how to use them, may be fount at:
http://work-rss.mail-abuse.org/rss/how.html

Here is a bit of information to help you do this using Mircosoft Exchange:

Symantec Mail Security
With this product, it’s as simple as activating a subscription to allow best-of-breed SPAM prevention. It will also allow administrators to filter content marked inappropriate across many file formats, as well as recognize file type based on their true type rather than simply checking extensions. The interface is considered by intuitive by some, and it provides acceptable performance.

Trend Micro ScanMail
ScanMail is true to its name. It searches out viruses and spam and provides filtration at the server level, so users never see SPAM at all. It uses scalable configuration, and email protection can be made to be largely automatic, freeing up system administrators for other project.

ScanMail allows individual access levels for mailboxes, so a single user be allowed to receive incoming without any filtration, while others may be monitored to varying degrees of protection.

GFI MailEssentials
For Exchange antiSPAM software, GFI ME is a very efficient add-on. Since it uses Bayesian analysis, it is able to perform filtering tasks regardless of the language of communication within the email itself. This allows administration of email protection to be performed across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

GFI MailEssentials provides most standard forms of filtering and mail monitoring as well, which makes it even more attractive to system administrators who must be ever-conscious of network resources.

Exchange Intelligent Message Filter
The default message filter built into Exchange is the IMF, or Intelligent Message Filter. each incoming message is evaluated and assigned a SPAM Confidence Level, or SCL. This rating is in turn compared to a threshold set by the admin in the System Manager. For low problem environments, this may be all the SPAM filtering required. Remember though, that this is ONLY for filtering out UCEs, and will have little effect on other malicious forms of email.

Article written by MyComputerAid.com