Free anti-spam software?

dynamik · February 2009

One of our clients, which is a church, is looking for a free anti-spam solution. They run Exchange in-house. Is there an easy way to set up something like Spam Assassin to do a little sanitizing and forward the good mail on to Exchange?

Silver Bullet · February 2009

You might check out Open Source Network Gateway | Untangle. has a lot of nice spam features plus lots more filtering of other types of content.

HeroPsycho · February 2009

What's wrong with the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) built into Exchange? Sure it's not as good as a commercial product, but it's free and easy to implement.

sprkymrk · February 2009

Spam Assassin may be free, but it's a lot of work if you're a mostly MS shop.

GFI MailEssentials is $21 per mailbox, not sure if that is out of their "free" budget range.

MailWasher is a free, well known, client side Anti-spam software.

msteinhilber · February 2009

Silver Bullet wrote: »

You might check out Open Source Network Gateway | Untangle. has a lot of nice spam features plus lots more filtering of other types of content.

Untangle is a decent solution if you use it to scan SMTP traffic, we deployed it primarily for it's other functions and gave the POP3 spam blocker a shot but found it to be incredibly slow (10-30 seconds per message).

I've used with good success ASSP (Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy) and have had good luck with it as well, more info here: Stop spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP)

dynamik · February 2009

Thanks everyone. I'll check out Untangle, Mail Washer, and ASSP.

Hero: I'll look into that. There's no reason that hasn't been implemented (aside from me still being an Exchange noob).

Mark: I knew SA would be a hassle, which is why I asked. If it came down to that, I might just pay for GFI out of pocket and take a few days off

hypnotoad · February 2009

plus one for untangle.

Untangle gives you the added bonus of being able to filter viruses and spyware on the network (not just in mail), and it does firewall, CoS, routing, and IPS. I recently built a test box and put it in as a transparent gateway. Easy to use and easy on the hardware. Good for small budgets and smbs.

HeroPsycho · February 2009

dynamik wrote: »

Thanks everyone. I'll check out Untangle, Mail Washer, and ASSP.

Hero: I'll look into that. There's no reason that hasn't been implemented (aside from me still being an Exchange noob).

Mark: I knew SA would be a hassle, which is why I asked. If it came down to that, I might just pay for GFI out of pocket and take a few days off

MailEssentials also has AV Exchange agent, so honestly that's what I'd do on a budget. But if you need free, IMF works okay.

Some other options...

Endian or Astaro firewalls both offer antispam and AV protection among other features like web AV and filtering, VPN, etc.

sprkymrk · February 2009

HeroPsycho wrote: »

MailEssentials also has AV Exchange agent, so honestly that's what I'd do on a budget. But if you need free, IMF works okay.

Some other options...

Endian or Astaro firewalls both offer antispam and AV protection among other features like web AV and filtering, VPN, etc.

I don' think Astaro is free anymore is it? Years ago it was....

dynamik · February 2009

sprkymrk wrote: »

I don' think Astaro is free anymore is it? Years ago it was....

They still have a free version for personal use; I'm not sure if they'll allow non-profits to use that. All the anti-x stuff requires add-on subscriptions though, which you'd probably have to pay for either way.

SWM · February 2009

Configure Exchange to use Spamcop, Sorbs etc blocking lists. While it will not get rid of all spam, every little bit helps

Talic · February 2009

My boss used to use the anti-spam tools on AVG which worked kinda well except when the user messed with their local settings. It's probably only good in small business environment.

Free anti-spam software?

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