I am looking for a better solution for stopping Spam.
I have seen many postings about the various antispam products, just like Adobe PhotoShop is the “800 pound gorilla” of graphic editors, what is the “800 pound gorilla” of antispam programs for Domino mail systems?
We use both Trend Micro’s ScanMail (antivirus) and eManager (antispam).
The antivirus part mostly works fine (we have occasional problems with ScanMail locking up all incoming mail in our mail.box on the mail server and then we have to rebuild the mail.box).
But I am not happy at all with their antispam plugin (eManager). I probably will not renew eManager and am looking for a better process for blocking Spam.
We do use Domino server rules which are NOT easy to use and are very hard to fine tune (kind of like going rabbit hunting with a cannon). But with enough work these can come in handy.
The biggest bang for the buck that we got was when we first started using the blackhole lists feature. That stopped the biggest amount of our Spam. It is surprising how many hotmail and MSN email servers end up on these blackhole lists.
We average blocking about 58% of the incoming email as Spam and Viruses using these techniques. Unfortunately the spammers (and virus writers) are getting trickier all of the time.
I have also spent a great deal of time going over the IBM Redbood about handling Spam.
I have seen a number of postings on this and the Domino 4, 5 and 6 forums talking about Spamassassin and many other products. I also believe in the multiple methods approach of stopping Spam where change (on our part) never really ends.
But what is the current “800 pound gorilla” of antispam programs used in front of a Lotus Domino mail server?
Subject: 800 pound gorilla of antispam programs
I like SpamSentinel available at http://www.maysoft.com
Subject: RE: 800 pound gorilla of antispam programs
I’ve been using Symantec SAV for Domino for about a year. The content filtering feature is high on promise, but not so hot on delivery.
The products’ UI generally is mediocre – Symantec has made it difficult (or impossible) to do things that come naturally to us Notes users (like copying documents, or putting documents into multiple categories). The documentation similarly is not so good; way short on real world examples. Technical support is adequate; it seems most of my inquiries are answered by first level support with second level support consultation. The product holds lots of promise, with the ability to construct many natural language rules. But it sounds like you, like mystelf, would like a product to work right out of the box without too much investment in rule construction. If that’s the case I would look at different products, or make sure that the resources you have to manage SAV knew of its capabilities …
Subject: There isn’t an 800 pound gorilla
There are a number of different choices, but none is the predminant leader. I tend to recommend spamJam (http://www.gsw.com), which has won a lot of awards and is very easy to use and very complete, but there are several other good choices out there as well, and all the good ones are getting better all the time, because they have to. Spm is a fast evolving issue, but there has not been time for an industry shakeout yet.
Subject: RE:800 pound gorilla of antispam programs
I’ve tested 3 different anti-spam products since December (SpamSentinel, MimeShield and PurePath).
SpamSentinel did not impress at all. MimeShield was pretty good including vendor support, but PurePath is amazing. It required very little tweaking, and is reducing about 95% (possibly more) of our spam. You may want to check into this at http://www.purepath.net/
I’ve found their support very responsive as well.
Subject: RE:800 pound gorilla of antispam programs
We have been using the PurePath ( http://www.purepath.net/ ) antispam for over a year. It changed our approach to email. We found out that about 60% of our mail is Spam.Before we found this program, we were a the mercy of spammers.
Being a public institution, many of our employees have their email on the website. They used to get 20 to 60 unsolicited emails per day. Every morning I would go through my e-mail and delete all Spams. If I was away for a few days I would start loosing the real mail since it became literally buried under junk mail.
We tried blocking addresses, Content filtering, country blocking, nothing seems to work.
Pure Path restored our confidence in email. It is constantly being upgraded since we installed it, and now is reducing our Spam problem to a couple of messages a day.
Subject: Check out…
…no.spam.domino from http://www.drcc.com. SpamJam is good, but updates are not as frequent as we’d like, and it’s not cheap!