Review: 3 Ways To Kill Spam Dead

Customers are drowning in unsolicited mail. Estimates of the amount of spam sent vary, but vendor estimates for 2007 range from 79 percent of messages to as high as 95 percent. Regardless, having a good spam filter in place is essential.

Which products actually deliver? That's the question the CRN Test Center plans to answer in a series of face-offs between the industry's antispam offerings.

We're starting here with a comparison of three products: MX Logic Email Defense Service, MX Ultimate Access from MX Logic Inc., Englewood, Colo.; Sendio ICE Box eMail Integrity Services Appliance from Sendio Inc., Irvine, Calif., and Sophos ES1000 from Sophos, Burlington, Mass.

But this is just the first of many antispam appliances, software and hosted services we're reviewing in an attempt to cover the mind-boggling variety of products that are available. So if your favorite isn't covered here, be patient. Check out CRN.com on April 28 for the next installment in the "Let's Can Spam" series.

Methodology
We evaluated the products with three viewpoints in mind: the solution provider, the system administrator and the end user.

Over a two-week period, all inbound traffic passed through the test product before reaching the mail server. Reviewers manually examined all mail before and after it passed through the test system to evaluate accuracy. Each system was given time to "learn" the mail before assessing its accuracy.

Reviewers also evaluated feature set, pricing, ease of deployment, management and reporting capabilities, and the ease in which users can correct errors. Each vendor's channel program was also evaluated.

The tests were conducted on a production mail server with a mix of live spam, malware and valid mail. The mail server, a Linux machine running exim, processed mail for five different domains, for a total of 15 distinct users. The box handled, on average, 14,000 to 15,000 messages each day, although that number was significantly higher at the end and beginning of each month, corresponding with peak activity in general spam traffic. While a bulk of the valid messages were direct, some were warnings and alerts generated by various applications and systems, and some users were subscribed to mailing lists. Users accessed their e-mail accounts in several ways, including Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Web mail and mutt (a text-based mail client for Unix-based systems). Hosted solutions were tested with a mail server running one domain, with seven users.

Next: MX Logic Email Defense Service, MX Ultimate Access