Rival solutions smack down spam

Brightmail now offers non-English support. It detects what language is in use in an e-mail for the top dozen languages (including Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, German, and Italian), and heuristics only run for the applicable language. It can also let through messages written in one specific language or in English and another language.

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Also new is the sender authentication feature, which ensures that the apparent e-mail address of a sender is legitimate and filters out messages from fake sender addresses before they even hit the server. Brightmail has done considerable work to optimize this feature. The filter rejects messages using the fastest filters first, thus reducing the load increase. Brightmail estimates that even with sender authentication turned on, overall load increases by less than 3 percent.

The results tell all: nearly 4,000 messages and no false positives, not even newsletters or marketing materials. Brightmail is an enterprise-caliber product with superb performance that didn’t need to be tuned at all, and that had almost no ongoing maintenance requirement.

Trend Micro InterScan Messaging Security Suite

IMSS is a full-featured anti-spam, anti-virus, and e-mail policy management suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, or Windows 2000 and 2003 Servers. Installation is relatively simple and can be done remotely if desired. When the product is installed, it must be registered via the Trend Micro Web site, which then e-mails activation keys that must be entered.

Configuration is straightforward, and the Web-based interface is easy to navigate, although after you make all your changes and click the Save button in each field, you must click the easy-to-overlook Apply Now button to update all the configuration changes to the server.

I initially received the out-of-date Version 2.0 of the spam engine, which shipped in late May. Unfortunately, the product’s Auto-Update feature updated anti-spam signatures but not the software engine, a problem the company says is fixed in the current Version 2.8. The product’s accuracy improved dramatically when I installed the newest edition, stopping 96.5 percent of spam and generating only one critical false positive, resulting in a bulk false positive rate of 0.72 percent.

IMSS allows for highly specific tuning of filters, from lenient to aggressive, in a variety of categories including sexual or racial content, profanity, chain letters, hoaxes, and HTML scripts. Filters can be tweaked for individual users, groups, or domains.

Admins may customize the actions taken when a filter is triggered. In addition to the usual defaults of quarantining, forwarding with an addition to the subject heading, forwarding to a different user account, or deleting what the other programs offer, you can also create custom responses. For instance, you could have all e-mails containing objectionable racial or sexual content automatically forwarded to an HR mailbox and with a warning inserted at the top of the message.

Users may access quarantine via a browser interface or an Exchange plug-in, allowing them to release messages and whitelist or blacklist senders. User and group information can be imported from Active Directory or other LDAP directories to speed the setup of users and groups in IMSS.

Aside from the outdated original version of the software issue, IMSS performed well, and it offers extensive policy management tools and granular management of anti-spam characteristics.

MailFrontierEnterprise Gateway 3.1

MailFrontier had the easiest installation of any of the products I tested and, as does IMSS, requires no additional software. The Windows installer automatically installs Tomcat and Java Runtime Engine, which grant access to quarantine. The installer installs to any Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 Server system on which you have administrator rights.

Admins may deploy the product remotely to one or more servers with a single install. Be mindful, however, that if you’re setting it up as a gateway and not paying close attention, you could inadvertently install it on the mail server instead of the local system, as I did.

When Enterprise Gateway is installed, you may retrieve users and groups from a Windows NT, Active Directory, Novell NDS, or other LDAP directory. Brightmail and Trend Micro offer the same capability. Individual user access to quarantine requires enabling the LDAP function; there’s no provision for creating user tables manually nor for automatically creating log-ins based on e-mail address. After user information is imported into the LDAP server on the MailFrontier system, it is automatically updated. New users added to the directory in Windows have access to quarantine as soon as they are enabled in the e-mail directory system.