Filters Take a Bite out of SPAM: Page 6 of 19

ModusGate 3.0. Vircom, (514) 845-1666. www.vircom.com Because Brightmail's antispam engine powers three of the Top 10 products, we decided to present these three together. Not surprising, their accuracy ratings were nearly identical. Brightmail is an antispam leader with a strong commitment to accurately identifying spam while minimizing false positives. The Brightmail antispam engine's false-positive rate was the best among the Top 10 vendors, and its overall weighted accuracy was only second to SpamStopsHere's.

BorderWare MXtreme Mail Firewall Appliance finished third overall because its price is on par with Brightmail's software pricing, and BorderWare adds significant value to its appliance by including EAL4 common criteria certification (see niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme), clustering for scalability, the best reporting module of all the products we tested, per box antivirus licensing, as well as exceptional attachment filtering and distributed admin facilities. In addition, BorderWare says it will include stateful failover in a high-availability configuration in version 4.

We liked Brightmail's Anti-Spam product, but it doesn't include some important features, such as attachment filtering and delegated administration. IronPort's appliance, on the other hand, was a heavyweight where message transfer, scalability and sender reputation are concerned, but it carries a heavyweight price.

The biggest drawback of the 3.1 version of BorderWare's appliance that we tested was that it didn't support message quarantine, only virus and attachment quarantine. At press time, BorderWare had released a version that supports Brightmail's quarantine.

BorderWare, Brightmail and IronPort all implement the same quarantine technology, relying on a separate server to host quarantined messages. This arrangement isn't optimal, especially with the appliances. We'd like to see a built-in quarantine server to help reduce admin overhead and relieve load on the mail server. Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino shops can implement Brightmail's Exchange or Domino plug-ins to move identified spam into a spam folder in the users' Exchange or Domino mailboxes rather than into quarantine.