Review: 3 Ways To Kill Spam Dead

Sendio ICE Box eMail Integrity Services Appliance
Sendio approached spam filtering differently. The method works—reviewers received zero spam during the testing period. From a user standpoint, this is great, as the inbox is always clean and there are no false negatives where spam slips past, but reviewers felt uneasy with the company's approach.

The appliance functions on a simple rule: If mail is not for a valid account, it's dropped at the onset. This included mail addressed to former employees or made-up names. This wasn't a default option on other products. Sendio, for example, uses Sender Address Verification, where the message sender is matched against the recipient's Accept List.

The ICE Box stores incoming messages into a temporary folder. If the sender is new to ICE Box, it sends a challenge e-mail back. The e-mail is politely worded, explaining it wanted to verify the sender's identity to stop spam. All the sender has to do is send a reply and the e-mail address is added to the approved-sender list.

The ICE Box monitors only mail coming from the outside, not intraoffice mail. This is handy, since the ICE Box can be configured to automatically kill mail that only looks like it came "from" the domain.

For end users, this is a breeze, since the chances of a spammer responding to the ICE Box challenge are close to nil as they use automated and anonymous mailers. But it does mean users are banking on the people sending them e-mail to recognize and respond to the challenge message.

For the solution provider, deployment is very straightforward: The partner tells Sendio the customer's IP address and what holes are open in the firewall. When Sendio ships the box, it's literally plug-and-go.

The ICE Box hardware is much more robust than the Sophos, with a 3-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, two 160-Gbyte hard drives, two NIC cards and 1 Gbyte of memory.

During testing, users had to log in to the temporary folder a few times to find the addresses and approve them so that error alerts would be delivered properly. Bulk messages also were manually approved. Logging into the ICE Box, users still have to sift through a list of messages to try to find the occasional valid message.

Sendio has three tiers in its partner program: Diamond, Double Diamond and 5 Diamond.

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