11 Anti-spam Products Tested

An anonymous reader writes "When we achieve world peace, that's when we'll get the perfect anti-spam solution. In the meantime, ZDNet has a comprehensive review of eleven of the latest anti-spam products including solutions from BitDefender, Clearswift, CA eTrust, GFI, IronPort, MailGuard, McAfee, MessageLabs, NetIQ, Network Box and Symantec Brightmail."

Re:SpamBayes?

[Umbral Blot]

Has anyone tried using all 11 on top of each other? Or would you kill too much of your desireable email. I am using Thunderbirds default spam filter, and the only span I see are ads from b&n and other online stores where I shop (still highly annoying). This is not an excuse to try to give me spam. I am fairly liberal with the distribution of my email address, I work on sourceforge after all, so what I am i doing right that others are not?

missing

[Anonymous Coward]

No Giant Anti Spyware?

Re:Yawn - No OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

spamassassin is definately used by messagelabs, gfi, and mcafee in part or in whole. If you poke around you can find information about it.

Re:SpamBayes?

[LnxAddct]

IIRC, SpamAssassin once properly trained and configured has yet to lose against any commercial or foss spam solution. DSAM is another amazing FOSS spam filter that could go up against the best of commercial products. But as another poster pointed out, FOSS doesn't advertise on their website unlike the 11 products reviewed.
Regards,
Steve

...ZDNet reviews products for WINDOWS

[Rick Zeman]

...and serious admins aren't exposing Windows to the internet to accept mail. But that's ZDNet for you....

No POPFile?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Before I moved to Gmail I used POPFile [sourceforge.net]. Not only as a spam filter, but to classify mail into categories. After a week of training it almost never got anything wrong.

Is this for real?

[JumboMessiah]

When being initially trialled/evaluated we would expect most anti-spam applications to run around 65 percent to 70 percent spam catch accuracy with very low to zero false positives in "default" or "out of the box" configurations. Then, once given the benefit of being "tuned" or "tweaked" and having localised white and black lists applied they should run at about 85 percent to 92 percent

I don't know about everyone else, but I'd expect a little more out of a product that costs thousands to implement. With a little research and dedication my SA 3.0.1 setup has no problem spanking those numbers.

I'm also assuming that none of these products produced extremely stellar results. The article never mentions any statistics based upon corpus runs for any of them. This is nothing more than TLA eyecandy...

I use none of these, and still get no spam

[wizardNinja]

huh...I dont get spam because i dont give out my email to any random person/site, etc...And if i need to give out an email, i have a couple of yahoo emails that are pretty disposable... Actually, i dont really get any mail at all...yeah... My roommate (college) gets lots of viruses. I cleaned up his comp one day and discovered a virus which had installed with his permission. It was actually in Add/Remove programs (windows). It had a readme file that said that it had installed after the user clicked OK to allow it. Yeah.. So Funny...

Re:SpamAssassin

[Mowog]

And the media will never give them attention until they [the Open Source solutions] start spending big bucks advertising with the media

That's not strictly true -- it depends on who the intended audience is. Technology & Business Magazine is (also) a print publication here in Australia, whose audience is primarily IT managers (and therefore businesses).

Most businesses want to BUY something to fix their spam problem and not try to fix it themselves. There are exceptions to that rule, but by and large IT managers are already busy enough and just want someone or something else to fix their spam.

I know this because my company (MailGuard) is one of those in the review. And no, we don't spend huge $$$ on advertising with ZDnet; we were invited to submit for the review, as I imagine were all the other vendors. Remember -- there are two worlds out there. Businesses will often recognise and implement Open Source solutions, but businesses also like to engage other businesses to handle non-core problems for them.

Re:SpamBayes?

[barcelona_stony]

I've had to configure CA eTrust at work (pointy hairs make the decision) and it was knocking off good emails from an inaccurate blacklist in minutes. I have to wade around with settings, users are powerless, and the company is getting mad at me for spending to much time 'configuring' it.

If I could put DSpam [nuclearelephant.com] on Exchange, I'd be happier than a clam. DSpam, for those who don't know it, is a great Bayesian filter.

Re:...ZDNet reviews products for WINDOWS

[SpiffyMarc]

Hopefully most of them!

Postfix gateway + Exchange 2003 server = corporate email bliss.

Re:Yawn - No OSS

[kaustik]

For a Sys Admin at a 100% Microsoft shop (me), do you have suggestions for a FOSS implementation that will play well with my Native mode 2000/Exchange 2000 domain? I can build up a linux server on very moderate hardware if I can prove to my office that it will perform. The solution would need to provide some sort of user interface for managing whitelists/blacklists/bayesian/etc... Also sorting by folder in the Exchange environment. Probably dreaming here, but worth a shot. I don't have huge amounts of time to research/test, so would appreciate imput.

Why don't they understand?

[Skal Tura]

Why doesn't the spammers understand that spamming is NOT the way go.

It destroys the rep of your company totally! But in most cases spammers don't care.

BUT

they should understand that is quite hard to get thru, so that the victim would even bother to open it. SPAM is destroying, and eating the net alive.
One finnish professor said not so long ago, that internet will die 2006 because of spam. is he right or not, i don't know, but we are definately heading to that way!

He said that spam would exceed by that so greatly the amount of usefull information, that it would be the death of internet.

There is also some flash cartoons about this heading. Anti spam solutions are being developed all the time, so are they finding more ways to get past them.

More and more spammers are starting to find more ways to spam, ie. using poorly administrated PHPNuke websites with webmail capability to spam!
My server also had one of those, i noticed it by accident, seeing that there were tens and tens of smtpd processes, time for a halt for SMTPD and to investigate the problem: bunch of people were spamming thru an website running on my server, PHPNuke with webmail.

About the sametime, couple days before that someone tried to find which accounts at my server were there by BRUTE FORCE! yes brute force, trying account names like fsdur, isau, weivd, weiouv, woidc, tens and tens of records per second!

More against spam needs to be done at the ISP level!

This is no more than an ad.

[Door-opening Fascist]

All these are commercial products. ZDNet has a long reputation of discussing commercial solutions without any regard to completely viable OSS solutions like

MailScanner [mailscanner.info]

MIMEDefang [mimedefang.org]

SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org]