IronPort adds value to Brightmail's Anti-Spam engine by tuning Brightmail's distribution to improve throughput (which means it's generally a week or two behind Brightmail in releasing new versions), and adding a spam check by referring to its sender reputation service, SenderBase (see www.senderbase.org). Even though Brightmail updates its filters every 10 minutes, we still found it to be susceptible to the hit-and-run spam attack. IronPort's reputation filtering helps to slow down the flow of spam until Brightmail catches up.
BorderWare Technologies MXtreme Mail Firewall Appliance Model MX-400 3.1. BorderWare Technologies, (877) 814-7900, (905) 804-1855. www.borderware.com
Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.5. Brightmail, (415) 905-5595. www.brightmail.com
IronPort Systems C60 Messaging Gateway Appliance 3.7.1-001. IronPort Systems, (650) 989-6500. www.ironport.com
Sophos, a United Kingdom-based firm with offices worldwide, has been shipping antivirus software since 1989. In September 2003 Sophos strengthened its position in the mail gateway market by purchasing ActiveState, a Canadian anti-spam vendor.
PureMessage runs on the major flavors of Unix and Linux and requires a sendmail or postfix installation to serve as its MTA (message transfer agent), making it ideally suited for organizations using sendmail or postfix. We used sendmail for testing and found that, between configuring sendmail and installing and configuring PureMessage, this package took some upfront work to get everything running the way we wanted. Admins who like to muck around with setup parameters can tweak and tune to their heart's content via custom policies, exposed APIs and integration with other parts of the infrastructure, including LDAP servers.
