IMail Plus antispam vs. 3rd party options

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IMail Plus antispam vs. 3rd party optionsExpand / Collapse
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Posted 5/2/2008 12:57:11 PM
Junior Member

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I'm currently running IMail 8.2. The only spam filtering in place right now is the IMail built in filtering rules. I'm wondering if it would be worth it to upgrade to IMail Plus v10 and get a servcice contract to utilize the advance spam filtering. Or, would a 3rd party solution be a better choice such as Declude, Baracudda, Watchguard ( I have a Watchguard firewall that can be configured with an anti spam option).

I'm looking for something with as little administrative overhead as is reasonable. I really don't want to be tweaking filters every couple days. Will IMail Plus fill the bill?

Post #43448
Posted 5/2/2008 3:06:42 PM
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I used the iMail Premium anti-spam for about a year.  My experience was about 18 months ago, so it could be there have been some improvements since that time.  I was only getting about 80% catch rate and lot of complaints from users about the amouint of spam that made it to the Inbox.  In particular, the filter was not effective at catching "image" spam, and it didn't seem to help to forward these messages to the reporting address.  The false positive rate was acceptable.  Also it seemed that I was spending many hours trying to tweak the URL lists, black lists, phrase lists, etc.

Eighteen months ago I installed a Barracuda 600 in front of my iMail server.  After initial setup, it has been trouble free and very effective with almost no false positives.  I spend very litte time administering the Barracuda ... it just works.  I get almost no user complaints.  One side benefit of the Barracuda is it keeps the large volume of junk off the iMail server, eliminating the SMTP and performance issues that have been discussed at length in this forum.

I run iMail for about 4500 users in 30 domains, about 800,000 messages per day.  About 95% of all inbound mail is identified as spam by the Barracuda, and never reaches the iMail server.  

Post #43453
Posted 5/5/2008 10:33:25 AM
Time Traveler

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it does suck... but i've tweaked it to catch about 98% or so... some of our employees who have been here 10+ years... get 15-25 messages of spam a day.. probably 5 of which are from our whitelists (not imail's fault)...

however before I implemented my advance filtering (using connection checks/dnsbl)... they were getting 100-150 spam messages a day... something that should send a red flag to all people thinking about paying money for imail...

i use an advance phrase list and url list... probably spent 100+ hours to reduce this from 100 to 10... make sure to use spamcop and zen spamhause blacklists as a base...
Post #43488
Posted 5/5/2008 3:05:12 PM
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jerger, are you using Premium Anti-Spam or IMail's default anti-spam filters?
Post #43494
Posted 5/5/2008 3:43:03 PM
Time Traveler

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premium.
Post #43495
Posted 5/10/2008 4:34:59 AM
Forum Guru

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I am biased in that I have been using and supporting Declude for about 7 years now.

John T
eServices For You

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882)

Post #43655
Posted 5/10/2008 8:17:38 AM
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I'm working with barracuda 400. The better choice that I made to remove spam
Post #43659
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