Exchange 2003 Anti-spam

paintb4707

I've used GFI Essentials up to its 30 day trial and it didn't seem to help too much. I tweaked the program quite thoroughly too. I disabled automatic whitelists, enabled bayesian filter, added several DNSBL's, ensured that all spam detected were DELETED and not TAGGED, added countless keywords based on the spam emails that were being received, but several users would still receive spam emails on a daily basis.

Also, most of our users are on outlook 2000 so IMF is relatively useless.

Any suggestions?

Andretii

Sunbelt Ninja has free trial too, I've seem good results with it after it has been fully updated etc.

Slowhand

I've been wanting to give Sunbelt Ninja a try. We use Cloudmark at our work, which really seems to do the job quite nicely, and Sunbelt uses the Cloudmark engine for it's anti-spam software.

sprkymrk

I have not used either Ninja or GFI Mail Essentials, but just want to drop an off-topic warning. I have been a long time fan and user of Sunbelt CSE and GFI SELM/EventsManager, but I have found that the tech support for both companies is mediocre at best, with Sunbelt getting the edge. I'd rate tech support for Sunbelt around 6 out of 10, and GFI 3 out of 10.

There is no toll-free number for tech support for GFI (however, there sales number is toll free) and you pay a 20% annual mainteneance free to get the tech support. So if you buy a $5000 package (that will get you around 50 servers to monitor I think) you will pay $1000 annually. In the several times I have had to use the tech support I am usually on-hold (long distance) for at least an hour before I give up and try their "Live Support" feature on their website. Unfortunately, the Live Support always gives the message "There is no one available to help you now, please submit this form for help" which is basically an email to their tech support. The fastest anyone has got back to me is 8 hours, usually it's sometime the next day. Then you have to bounce emails back and forth "Try this", "that didn't work", "Well make sure this says that and try again", "already did", etc... I've been working on one issue for over a week like that so far.

Sunbelt is better because I have been able to reach a person by phone after the usual "on hod" queue (20-25 minutes usually) and their tech support folks are pretty nice. However, many times I was given step-by-step instructions on upgrading but they never worked and I always ended up reinstalling and spending a day reconfiguring the software and cleaning up the clients. The problem was not tech supports fault though, it was the developers never realized that someone might not want to install CSE to something other than the C: drive... Go figure.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but just wanted to express my opinion of the tech support of the two companies named.

paintb4707

Andretii wrote:

Sunbelt Ninja has free trial too, I've seem good results with it after it has been fully updated etc.

I was looking at Sunbelt but it seemed rather expensive. I did not know that they offer a trial though, thanks for that.

sprkymrk wrote:

I have not used either Ninja or GFI Mail Essentials, but just want to drop an off-topic warning. I have been a long time fan and user of Sunbelt CSE and GFI SELM/EventsManager, but I have found that the tech support for both companies is mediocre at best, with Sunbelt getting the edge. I'd rate tech support for Sunbelt around 6 out of 10, and GFI 3 out of 10.

There is no toll-free number for tech support for GFI (however, there sales number is toll free) and you pay a 20% annual mainteneance free to get the tech support. So if you buy a $5000 package (that will get you around 50 servers to monitor I think) you will pay $1000 annually. In the several times I have had to use the tech support I am usually on-hold (long distance) for at least an hour before I give up and try their "Live Support" feature on their website. Unfortunately, the Live Support always gives the message "There is no one available to help you now, please submit this form for help" which is basically an email to their tech support. The fastest anyone has got back to me is 8 hours, usually it's sometime the next day. Then you have to bounce emails back and forth "Try this", "that didn't work", "Well make sure this says that and try again", "already did", etc... I've been working on one issue for over a week like that so far.

Sunbelt is better because I have been able to reach a person by phone after the usual "on hod" queue (20-25 minutes usually) and their tech support folks are pretty nice. However, many times I was given step-by-step instructions on upgrading but they never worked and I always ended up reinstalling and spending a day reconfiguring the software and cleaning up the clients. The problem was not tech supports fault though, it was the developers never realized that someone might not want to install CSE to something other than the C: drive... Go figure.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but just wanted to express my opinion of the tech support of the two companies named.

Thanks for the input. That's certainly something to consider.

Smallguy

paintb4707 wrote:

I've used GFI Essentials up to its 30 day trial and it didn't seem to help too much. I tweaked the program quite thoroughly too. I disabled automatic whitelists, enabled Bayesian filter, added several DNSBL's, ensured that all spam detected were DELETED and not TAGGED, added countless keywords based on the spam emails that were being received, but several users would still receive spam emails on a daily basis.

Also, most of our users are on outlook 2000 so IMF is relatively useless.

Any suggestions?

We use GFI at my work for several companies we support and it has always worked well

the Bayesian filter has to be trained until you get the 3000 Ham messages or it to work well

we also like to store the messages in a folder for review daily


I assume u had the latest build and performed updates as the came out.. but I've found the forums at GFI to be pretty useful

GFI also has won a few awards

Andretii

Another easy to use and very reliable solution that I've used is MX Logic. This one is a service.