The Mirapoint RazorGate 160 (v3.8.4-GA) did reasonably well in anti-spam performance, placing fourth in filtering accuracy and seventh in false positives. That’s well within useful performance, though admins should count on spending some time building whitelists if they have users who get a lot of bulk e-mail. Compliance and content filtering features were broad and easy to use, with scanning inside archives and the capability to hold encrypted e-mails for inspection if desired.

The Bottom Line Mirapoint RazorGate 160 v3.8.4-GA Mirapoint, mirapoint.com Good  7.9 criteria score weight Effectiveness 8 30% Manageability 8 30% Scalability 8 20% Setup 7 10% Value 8 10% Cost: $6,950 for hardware; $15,950 for 1,000 users for 1 year Bottom Line: The RazorGate offers a great feature set at a relatively low price. Good spam filtering is aided by the capability to reject substantial amounts of spam before it enters the network, using reputation filtering. Interoperability with most standard backup applications eases backup of quarantined and archived messages. Initial configuration is confusing, requiring a specific local DNS entry for the RazorGate. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

The RazorGate is a mature product that is generally easy to set up and configure, except for one oddity: there needs to be a DNS entry for the appliance on your internal DNS server. Rather than depending on the IP address in its internal configuration, the RazorGate can only resolve its own address externally. Small organizations that don’t have an internal DNS server will want to look elsewhere, but given the fairly high minimum price for this system it’s unlikely that small organizations will consider it.

[ Compare spam filtering statistics for the mail security appliances tested. Compare their features. Return to “Test Center guide: Mail security appliances.” See reviews of the appliances from Barracuda, BorderWare, Cisco, Mirapoint, Proofpoint, Secure Computing, Sendio, Symantec, and Tumbleweed. ]

A central console administers all RazorGates in an enterprise; there is no separate login for individual boxes. This feature is typical of the enterprise orientation of this system, which also includes clustering that is easy to set up, good reporting and logging, and management via NDMP (network data management protocol), which is used by BakBone’s NetVault, IBM Tivoli, Veritas NetBackup, and others for backups via the network or direct to tape via SCSI. The RazorGate also offers excellent compliance filtering and monitoring, with a “wiretap” feature that allows suspicious mail to be forwarded to a designated person who reviews the mail to ensure compliance with policy. The wiretap feature can also be used to archive all e-mail for a group or domain to an alternative location.

The RazorGate is inexpensive for the full feature set supplied. Although anti-spam performance is not outstanding, it is more than adequate for most organizations, and given the enterprise-class features, the RazorGate is worth a second look.