Ten reasons why Mail essentials is better than the Exchange 2007 IMF |
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GFI software produces what we consider to be the best anti spam product on the market today. We’ve been using Mail essentials for over 9 years, and we can usually stop 95 – 98% of all spam with no (or very few) false positives.
This article explains why we think Mail Essentials is an ‘essential’ purchase, and why in today’s spam climate – the token offering by Microsoft – the Exchange Intelligent Message filter just doesn’t cut it.
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Block lists
Both the Exchange IMF and Mail Essentials support user defined block lists, but the IMF doesn’t support SURBL lists (lists of websites that have appeared in spam emails).
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Different Actions for Different Technologies
Mail Essentials enables you to chose what to do for each anti spam technology – for instance, you might want to delete a message with a blacklisted keyword on it without sending an NDR, but make messages from senders that are on a block list go into the recipients junk mail folder. With the exchange IMF you can only forward quarantined emails to a predefined email address – also all inbound mails that are found to be on a block list are not received (as it’s a connection based technology).
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NDR spam
This is probably the most awkward type of spam for network administrator as you get lots of calls from users thinking they’ve been used as a mail relay or ‘hacked’. Exchange just doesn’t know how to deal with this – and always appears to let it through, Mail Essentials new SpamRazer technology is very effective at removing it completely.
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Blacklists & Whitelists
Exchange 2007 has a whitelist, but no blacklist – this means you cannot block emails based on the content of the message. Mail Essentials lets you specify blacklisted words, and also what to do with them based on where they appear in the message for instance only block the word if it appears in the message body, if it appears in the subject then let it through.
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Blocking based on languages
Mail Essentials lets you block messages based on the character sets that are in use in the message, this is very good at stopping spam with Chinese websites trying to sell you fake Rolexes etc. Exchange server doesn’t have this capability.
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Anti Phishing
GFI has it’s own list of websites that pretend to be banking sites so they can steal your banking details. These are blocked so they never even reach your users. Exchange doesn’t have this functionality.
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Bayesian Filter Training
This is my favourite, not because of the Bayesian technology but that it empowers users into training the anti spam filter. You’ve not only got the benefit of training the Bayesian filter, but also your users will not call you to complain about spam and they feel much better about the spam they receive as they will be able to deal with it themselves (thus reducing calls to the helpdesk).
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The Realtime Dashboard
It’s really hard with Exchange Server to confirm that mail flow is working without enabling transport logging and checking the content of those log files. The realtime dashboard gives you a graphical representation of your servers email flow.
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Spam Reporting
The Management reports in Mail Essentials are very useful for showing your management exactly how much spam is being blocked. Most managers are blissfully unaware of the amount of spam that they could be receiving – giving them the reports from Mail Essentials gives you the opportunity to show that the systems you’ve put in place are working and you’ll probably get a well earned pat on the back - and if you haven't already - justifies the cost of Mail Essentials to the management. There is no spam reporting whatsoever with Exchange 2007.
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The Auto Whitelist
When one of your users sends an email to a recipient outside of your company, that email address gets automatically added to the whitelist. After a short while you will find that all your partner companies email addresses will be on that list. You usually find that most of your companies’ communications with its partners and customers will not have any issue – no matter what the content of the message is.
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