Commercial solutions win, spam loses

Brightmail offers extensive reporting features, a wide variety of standard reports as well as custom reports. An optional anti-virus capability powered by Symantec is available at additional cost, with virus definitions and engine updates delivered by Brightmail.

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FrontBridge TrueProtect

FrontBridge is a hosted service that incorporates four layers of e-mail filtering -- custom blacklists, proprietary fingerprinting, adaptive rules-based scoring, and real-time attack prevention, which blocks illegitimate and potentially damaging e-mail based on a sender's IP address. FrontBridge was recently selected by Sprint as its anti-spam solution.

Installing FrontBridge consists of merely changing the MX record for your e-mail server to point to the FrontBridge mail processor. FrontBridge processes all your e-mail, incoming and outgoing, and forwards the good stuff to your mail server or its outbound destination. There is no impact on your local network configuration, and overall Internet traffic is reduced because spam never reaches your network. FrontBridge claims never to have had a service outage and guarantees 99.99 percent uptime. With eight datacenters worldwide, the company seems to have the infrastructure to make such a guarantee. FrontBridge offers additional services beyond anti-spam, including anti-virus, content filtering, policy enforcement (such as who can send and receive which file types), and disaster recovery, which involves holding all e-mail for as long as five days if your network is unreachable.

Configuring accounts and other administrative tasks is done through an HTTPS log-in to FrontBridge's Web site. Setting up accounts is simple: An automated user enrollment feature allows all the accounts in a domain to be added without having to build an access control list. Administrative tasks, such as modifying filter rules or anti-virus settings or adding and deleting users, can be set by domain so that each of several domains or sub domains can each be maintained by different administrators.

Reporting is excellent, and reports can be easily exported to Excel for analysis. By default, a digest of filtered spam is delivered weekly to all users as an HTML e-mail. Users can retrieve any e-mail that has been quarantined, and can whitelist the sender with a single click. End-users can also log in to the Web site at any time and view all filtered messages with the same options to deliver the message or whitelist the sender.

FrontBridge caught 90 percent of the spam in the test, ranking below Brightmail, Proofpoint, and Postini in accuracy. But it misidentified no critical e-mail, and only 1 percent of noncritical messages, proving more adept than all but Brightmail at avoiding false positives.

Postini Perimeter Manager

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Postini's anti-spam service processes about 150 million messages per day. Although it started as a service for ISPs, it has recently moved into the enterprise space and provides a broad, sophisticated array of services. It is the only product I tested that includes anti-virus scanning in the base price.

Setting up the service is simple, requiring the same MX record change as FrontBridge's service. Adding users is automated and very easy -- each user receives a message the first time that spam is blocked from their account, letting them know how to access quarantined e-mail and retrieve, delete, or whitelist mail. All administrative tasks can be accomplished through the Postini Web site, and management tasks can be delegated in a very granular manner. Managing multiple domains is easy. Reporting is flexible in the criteria reported, but long-term tracking is not available in the standard corporate edition -- only daily and weekly reports are made available.

Response to spam is unusually flexible, and can be set by individual, group, or domain. Administrators can allow users to add senders to the whitelist, retrieve messages from quarantine, and even change filter settings -- or they can lock things down so that end-users can do nothing without an administrator. The spam filters have separate settings from lenient to strict for a variety of categories, including bulk e-mail, special offers, get-rich-quick messages, and adult content.

The Standard Edition includes spam filtering, inbound server monitoring, connection management, delivery management, detailed reporting, inbound attachment management, inbound virus blocking, and inbound content management. The Enterprise Edition adds outbound server monitoring, outbound virus blocking, outbound attachment management, outbound content management, and disaster-recovery service. It can also check outbound e-mail for policy violations concerning language, recipients, and attachments.

Postini is very flexible and feature-rich, and it caught nearly 94 percent of spam in my tests, edged out only by Brightmail and Proofpoint. It lagged slightly in avoiding false positives, but the differences here could easily be overcome by whitelist tuning.