Alot of anti-spam products are on the market now, and the list is growing quickly. While the market is starting to see some large antivirus and security companies buying small anti-spam entrepreneurs, there is still room for innovation, and small players can still play a part by keeping the larger companies from getting complacent. Note that many of the products listed here have won awards from various organizations. While the kind of award won and from whom can provide some insight into the product, I never take them very seriously, and rely on independent reviews for comparison.
Thorough review articles on anti-spam (and, any other) products can provide additional insight, but in my opinion, you’d be making a mistake if you consider awards in your selection criteria at all. I’m leaving out client-based products from this list because they are typically not aimed at business use. Spam solutions that run at the client level are fine products, but in a business environment, because you need central control of the product behavior that doesn’t include touching every workstation in the company. While the central control problem is solvable, I also dislike installing nonmanaged software on every workstation in the enterprise when I don’t have to. Please note that almost all the vendors with anti-spam products listed here also sell antivirus products as well. I only include an antivirus product if it’s a part of the anti-spam product. In the cases where I don’t list an antivirus product, it is almost certainly possible to purchase antivirus from that vendor as welland integrate it into the spam filter.
1.McAfee SpamAssassin
www.mcafee.com
McAfee has taken an interesting approach to how it acquires spam-filtering technology: It’s licensing a mature open source software product called SpamAssassin. This is a host-based (loaded onto the mail server itself) solution for either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino servers, which is interesting, considering that SpamAssassin was originally written for UNIX.
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2.MailFrontier Gateway Server
www.mailfrontier.com
MailFrontier is the only company I’ve seen that correctly identifies phishing as a separate category of bad e-mail from spam, and deals with it in a completely different way than it deals with regular spam. Incoming e-mail can be classified as fraud, rather than just spam, when that label applies. Combining this with integrated virus scanning and e-mail policy enforcement makes MailFrontier Gateway Server an interesting all-in-one appliance.
MailFrontier has also given considerable thought to the user experience and provides a number of tools to make spam filtering individualized, both with personal whitelists and blacklists and how aggressively to handle potential spam based on category and language. Like some other products, MailFrontier Gateway Server delivers a spam digest, which is basically a listing of recent spams received that gives you the option to click links in the e-mail to receive false positives. The product also provides direct Web access to the quarantine, in case a user doesn’t want to wait until the digest is sent out to receive a false positive.
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3.Trend Micro Spam Prevention Solution
www.trendmicro.com/en/products/gateway/spam/evaluate/overview.htm
The Trend Micro Spam Prevention Solution is interesting in that it’s packaged as an in-house version of the software used by an all-ASP provider – Postini. From some reports, the same software Postini uses in its ASP doesn’t do quite as good of a job in this in-house version, due to local tuning versus Postini’s professional tuning based on vast spam-filtering experience. This gateway solution allows administrators to assign different spam-filtering sensitivities to specific user groups, so that groups such as IT can receive things like activation keys (which always look like spam because they are short and full of junk that doesn’t look like normal text), and other groups can remain more protected.
Trend Micro has an excellent gateway virus scanner with support for more than just Windows as a platform, which might be helpful if you are not using a strictly Windows environment. The company’s continued support for Solaris and Linux with this product means that you can integrate your spam filter with mature virus scanning software on whatever platform you are comfortable with.
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www.ciphertrust.com
The IronMail appliance is a pretty complete e-mail security appliance, which includes more than just filtering spam and viruses. IronMail offers “policy and content compliance,” which includes the following:
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8.FrontBridge TrueProtect Message Management Suite
www.frontbridge.com
FrontBridge TrueProtect Message Management suite is an ASP solution with a major emphasis on stability and availability. FrontBridge has seven datacenters worldwide currently, with plans to open four more. Its service guarantees include 99.999 percent availability, with 100 percent availability to date.
TrueProtect spam filtering is based on proprietary algorithms that do blacklisting, fingerprinting (comparing current mail to known spam directly), and rules-based scoring. Like all the other ASP solutions and some of the gateway products, FrontBridge relies on information gathered from the billions of spams that it filters to block the few thousand headed for you.
To ensure that you don’t miss e-mail that’s important to your business, TrueProtect processes outbound mail, too. If you choose to send your outbound mail through FrontBridge, the solution learns that those people you are sending mail to are most likely not spammers when it sees mail coming back from them. This means your whitelists are at least partly automatically generated. FrontBridge virus scanning employs scanners from Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro so that it doesn’t have to worry about who has a signature for the newest virus first. Whoever wins the race that day is put in place for virus scanning.
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9.Sophos PureMessage
www.sophos.com/products/pm
Sophos wins the prize for the most platforms supported by an integrated solution, though for some reason its UNIX support seems slightly better than Windows. (For UNIX, I see support for personal whitelists and blacklists, but this support doesn’t appear to be available for Windows.
PureMessage handles the disposal of spam somewhat differently from most other products: It allows administrators to discard, quarantine, modify subjects, or add hidden headers based on a calculated probability that the specific message is spam. Based on this, a sophisticated internal mail system could have multiple quarantine areas: One with messages that are most likely spam Another for messages that are probably spam but that a user might want to examine for false positives from time to time.
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10.Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway
www.proofpoint.com/products/msg.php
Proofpoint offers modular mail protection services either as a software package running on a provided hardened Linux OS with the Messaging Security Gateway, or as an appliance in the Protection Server. The Proofpoint solution really wants to be on the edge of your network (outside of the firewall, where other mail servers connect directly to it), in order to perform some of its connection-based testing. For example, Proofpoint does DNS and MX-level checking on the connection and on the From: address, as well as a dynamic check with its own database of known bad senders (basically, a private real-time blackhole list). The other interesting thing about this solution is Proofpoint’s “corporate lexicon” adapter that allows you to adapt the solution’s checking to your particular industry. That’s handy if you happen to be in certain industries that have some relationship to products typically sold by spammers, such as home loans or prescription medications.
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Source artikel from : Windows XP for Dummies Books