It’s important to note that there is no one solution that will block 100% of your spam – any product that claims to do that likely turns up many false positives thus negating the positive benefit of blocking spam.

We use a managed service provided by FrontBridge (www.frontbridge.com), recommended to me by a friend. They were formerly an email hosting provider and about 2 years ago decided to take advantage of the market for spam prevention. Their service blocks about 95% of our spam, and we haven’t had any false positives. Anything we do receive is easily reported to their abuse email address. Administration is very simple, there’s very little configuration, and we don’t have to spend time managing rules or black lists. They also provide virus blocking and other services. I recommend you check them out, they’re a great front-line defense.

I host around 1200 mailboxes on my exchange servers. SPAM is quite an issue for me, so I have two levels of protection.

At the ISP I am provided with EMF (http://www.emailsystems.com/) which is very nice to use and highly effective. However, this isn’t the best in my situation, since I only have limited access to it. (The rules set up by the ISP are OK, but could be better)

I also use puremessage on my mail server (www.sophos.com) and have found that to be very effective as well.

HTH

HAND

Snowin.

You may want to take a look at the baracuda spam filter, we have had one in use for about 6 months and have just bought a second for one of our other companies works well.

Look into a managed service. I am considering MXLogic and ContextCatcher. I am trying to get information from Postini but they have not called me back. They charge monthly and the more users you have, the lower the price per user.

We use a two-tiered approach. On the perimeter, we have Unix boxes running SendMail and SpamAssassin and we have Exchange SMTP gateways running internally running Trend Micro’s eContent Management. Each of these has updated rule files and is configurable. Between the two, we block 95+% of spam. Of course, that doesn’t keep some of the users from complaining about the

http://www.barracudanetworks.ca/?OVRAW=barracuda%20spam&OVKEY=barracuda%20spam&OVMTC=standard

we stop 95% for little $

You may also want to consider a spam filtering service such as postini or mail frontier.

Bob

We used to have client based products but was time consuming to update, train users, service call questions, conflict with other outlook based add ins such as voicemail and faxes to the desktop. Exchange server based products can have adverse affects to the exchange server. Our experience with Exchange server thrid party apps has caused downtime now and then.

Having said that we have switched to message labs for our antispam service. We also use they anti virus service for emails. Using a service like this will greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth on your internet connection since the spams will not traverse it. Hence, you may not need to upgrade your internet pipe for growth since you will gain this. Additionally, note that alot of viruses come in the form of spam. Therefore if you greatly reduce your spam, particullarly on your backbone/internet pipe, then you have also reduced viral infected emails from reaching your backbone. The use of Antivirus from this service has the benefit of them scanning emails for viruses by three different products. Plus we scan at the Exchagne server and client level. Therefore you have multiple vendors scanning products scanning at different levels which greatly reduces email borne viruses compare to using a product from on vendor only.

NetIQ’s MailMarshal product and the Singlefin managed service have worked well for me.