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Know of any requirements for a good spam filter.

Hi,

I am working on a list of questions and criteria to ask a vendor and would like to know if there is a best practice list of requirements or a good spam filter. I search the web but no luck.

Thanks

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dsnegi_25dec

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Simon Butler (Sembee)

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sbukovic

I have had good experiences with Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall and Cisco Ironport. They have a tiered approach to model selection with physical, virtual, and cloud based solutions. I, personally, prefer Barracuda over Ironport due to Administrative flexibility, but Cisco Ironport rates very well in the marketplace and would not be a bad choice what so ever.

Regardless, you want to make sure that you have a good idea of the volume of email transactions that you will need the email security appliance to handle and use that as the basis for sizing. You will also need to identify what kind of fault tolerance your company requires as that can dramatically impact sizing and price. Most reputable vendors have a multi-layered approach to email scanning and utilize spam, virus, malware, image scanning (OCR), file reputation analysis, and URL analysis to name a few. Reputable vendors will give you a 30-60 day free trial of their solution/appliance to install into your infrastructure. I would definitely shy away from software based AntiSpam solutions that are meant to be installed on your Exchange Server or other MTA server solution.

Below is a an article from Infoworld back in 2008 that gives a good overview of how you should evaluate a email security appliance solution.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2650023/security/test-center-guide--mail-security-appliances.html