Review: Send A Message To Spam

Arguably, e-mail has become one of the most important forms of communication for the 21st century, yet its reputation as a time-saving, efficient communications mode has lost its luster over the last few years. Thanks to spam, inappropriate content, data leakage, malware and so on, e-mail has become more of a burden than a help for many users, and, worse yet, a liability for employers.

On the plus side, those problems have created a cottage industry for VARs selling e-mail services and solutions to their customers. The range of offerings includes everything from content control to antispam to hosted e-mail services, and that's where MessageLabs comes in.

The company is offering a managed e-mail security platform to its partners for resale to end users. The MessageLabs Email services suite includes antispam, antivirus, content control, image control and encryption, all of which prove to be important considerations for today's corporate messaging solutions.

While spam has become the scourge of e-mail users, many still fail to recognize the importance of other problems that can be encountered when using unmanaged e-mail systems. MessageLabs takes on those problems by offering a platform that all corporate e-mail messages must travel through. That approach allows VARs to start with smaller solutions that offer excellent control over e-mail content and incorporate one or two basic services, such as spam prevention and antivirus. They can then sell additional services as the need arises and even offer a fully managed e-mail service.

VARs looking to jump on the e-mail control bandwagon will find MessageLabs' offering one of the easiest to deploy. Simply put, through its hosted e-mail offering, all of a customer's inbound and outbound messages travel through a MessageLabs mail server, which is where all of the security processing takes place. Not only does it make installation a simple matter of redirecting MX records, but an additional advantage is that no unwanted content ever enters the local network. That means all content filtering, antivirus and image processing takes place outside of the user's network, which adds an extra layer of protection and reduces traffic on network connections.

VARs will find installation, configuration and management of the product straightforward. While installation requires little more than redirecting a customer's e-mail to a MessageLabs server, configuration involves a few steps to ensure that the service is deployed properly. Luckily, MessageLabs makes that chore easy with its browser-based management console, which allows administrators to turn features on and off, define policies and generate reports.

The key behind making the service effective comes from defining policies, which can be companywide, departmentwide, for an individual or for a range of tests to be performed on inbound e-mails.

Starting with the antispam capability, administrators can define the policies in place for spam prevention. For example, an administrator can create global whitelists, which allow certain e-mails to come through the spam-filtering process. Users may also have the capability to create their own whitelists and blacklists for e-mail messages. That helps to cut down on false positives. The vendor claims that its spam filtering is over 99 percent accurate.

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