The MailGate supports multiple domains and can route mail to different servers based on the destination domain. Permissions
can be set at a very granular level, both for administrators and for users. For a drop-in appliance that can be running in
20 minutes from the time the box is opened, the MailGate provides great performance at a competitive price.
MessageLabs Anti-Spam Service
The advantage to a service is that no changes in the local network are necessary, and it reduces overall traffic from the
Internet, because spam is filtered before it gets to the corporate network. As with other services such as Postini and Frontbridge,
setup and installation involve nothing more than making one change to the DNS records for your mail server. MessageLabs doesn’t
offer the broadest range of features of all the services I’ve reviewed, and the percentage of spam caught was lower than usual
for the products I’ve tested, but pricing is great and the number of false positives was very low.
The MessageLabs service offers a global platform with nine datacenter locations around the world. Account activation is straightforward
and easy to configure, for one domain or many. Adding new users is accomplished automatically.
Users receive an e-mail showing them all the e-mails that have been quarantined. The administrator can set the time intervals
that users receive notifications from once a week to once an hour. The user can then release the e-mails with one click.
The anti-virus service is enabled and activated once an account is provisioned. Activating the anti-spam capability is straightforward,
mostly a matter of designating which of the various anti-spam technologies will be enabled, and what should be done with detected
spam.
Anti-spam technologies include several open subscription lists of mail servers that send spam or allow unverified users to
send mail, as well as MessageLabs’ heuristic scanning, which works by scoring each e-mail against a set of rules. If the e-mail
in question earns a specified score, it is identified as spam. Spam can have the header altered and forwarded normally, have
the header altered and be forwarded to a bulk mail address, be blocked (quarantined), or be deleted.
Each account has 3,000 entries for a custom whitelist and blacklist. Both the whitelist and blacklist can be specified by
senders’ domain, e-mail address, or IP address. Accounts can be configured so that users can be allowed to add to the whitelist
and blacklist themselves or so that only the administrator can add to the lists.
Automatic provisioning works well, and adding domains to an account is also straightforward. Delegation of administration
(allowing a specified user to administer all or part of a domain) is basic and easy to do. Reporting functions are limited
but what’s there is what most administrators will be looking for — however, historical information is not easily accessible.
As a service, MessageLabs reduces traffic over your Internet connection, and the anti-virus filtering provides security before
traffic even gets to the firewall.
All of these products provided exceptionally low false positives. If you’re looking for a full-featured e-mail security appliance
that also filters spam, CipherTrust brings an exceptional variety of capabilities to the table. If you’re looking for a simple,
easy-to-use appliance, the Corvigo is a great bet, especially for smaller organizations. And if you want a service’s ability
to reduce traffic over your network connection, MessageLabs is a good fit.
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