Review of Anti Spam Software for Exchange Server

Anti spam software are available in plenty and it is a difficult task to choose one that might suit your requirements. You can perform a search with the help of a good search engine to find out the new products that are available for spam control. It is better to know the customary features that are supported by these anti spam software and the server with which they integrate well. For the exchange server there are many anti spam software that work fine and here we will see some of the top software that are used for the Exchange server. Software like GFI MailEssentials, BitDefender, NoSpamToday, Exclaimer, ORF and SurfControl are some of the software that is used to handle spam that is received by us daily.

How to hide e-mail address from the spambots and spiders?

One way to hide your email addresses is to write them in a non-email format so that only human readers can read it, whereas the spambots and spiders may not read them. Suppose you have an email id like yourid@yourdomain.com, then you can write that email address as "yourid at yourdomain dot com". The user can read this and spambots are fooled in harvesting that email address. One of the drawbacks of this format is that still there are users who may not be aware that it is an email. Most of the users still like to click a link that open their email client or fill out a form to send emails. If the spambots is intelligent it can also read this type of formats. Still this works out for most of the spambots.

GFI MailEssentials

GFI MailEssentials is an anti spam software that is used for Exchange/SMTP server. This is used to manage your emails and to prevent your inbox being dumped by junk emails. Since this software is deployed in the Exchange server there is no need to have any client software at the user end. This software is found to use the Bayesian filtering technology. With this filtering technology it is found to eliminate around 98% of the spam that you receive. A separate spam profile database is maintained in a remote server and this database is updated periodically so that your database to filter spam is up to date. Support for Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is there. The mail header and the keywords in the emails received by you are checked and analyzed before filtering them as spam. White lists are automatically managed by this software. It is also possible to have your own custom blacklists so that you can prevent emails from being received by these custom blacklists. DNS blacklist checking is also done by this GFI MailEssentials software. As with all the anti-spam software this software also sends Disclaimer with all the outgoing emails. It is possible to monitor a particular email address with this software. Extensive reports like spam filtering reports and top mail users can be generated with this software. This software easily integrates with Exchange Server.

BitDefender

For all the servers that run under the Windows platform there is an anti spam software called BitDefender. This software also has a lot of features that are aimed at filtering spam. Apart from filtering the emails this software also does the anti virus scanning and cleaning of the incoming mails. If you subscribe for this software you will be automatically prompted to update the software whenever there is an update available. BitDefender also protects against viruses, worms and other code that are potentially dangerous to your system. Different types of filters are there to achieve the above said tasks. Filters like IPmatch, Keyword, White list, Black list, Charset, URL, and Heuristic are available. BitDefender provides you with an Admin module that can be used to generate reports of various kinds.

NoSpamToday

Another product that is of interest is the NoSpamToday anti spam software. This anti spam software is a proxy server that connects your mail server to the Internet. By being in between the mail server and the Internet it filters all the junk emails from entering your mail server. This software uses a SpamAssassin engine that is used to filter out the junk emails that you receive. The SpamAssassin engine is used to add a flag to the subject line of the emails. With that you can easily identify the spam. The spam emails are quarantined so that the user can do anything with the spam emails. They can delete the spam or move to a spam folder. This software has an attachment blocker that can be used to accept or deny a particular of attachments in the incoming and outgoing emails. It also filters out the malicious attachments that come to the mail server. To configure this anti spam software you are provided with an administrative module. With this software you can use third party anti virus software and it is also possible to reject attachments from the emails. This anti spam software can be used with any SMTP server. Free tech support is also provided by the manufacturer of this product for commercial implementations.

Exclaimer

Exclaimer is an anti spam product that is used with Exchange server. With this software you can easily add text and images to the incoming and outgoing emails so that you send professional emails with your logos and text. As with other anti spam software you can add disclaimers with your emails. Monitoring the emails that are sent is possible with this software. A copy of all the emails is send to a mailbox. This process is invisible to other users. The administrator can check this secret mailbox to monitor those activities that are going on in the company. One of the other features that are of interest is that with this software you can block or redirect an email that is intended for a particular user. A powerful feature that is available with this software is that it enables you to customize the rules and features for a particular email user. This enables you to apply different rules for different users. Support for HTML, Rich Text and other formats are there with this software. You can design your own templates for sending emails for a particular occasion. You can also have complete control of the HTML in the templates that are designed. Maintenance is minimal with this software. Auto responders are available with this software so that you can send automatic responses to the emails that you receive. When an auto response is sent is possible to add the original email as an attachment or in the body of the reply itself.

ORF Enterprise Edition

ORF Enterprise Edition is another product that is used an as anti spam solution. This product integrates with even the IIS SMTP service of the Windows 2000/2003 Servers. It can also be integrated with the Exchange Servers. Filtering and anti spam technologies are combined to protect you from spam. This software has a dual filtering model to filter emails at the protocol level so that they are filtered before arrival. It also uses databases that are available online and are updated regularly for spam characteristics. With these features you are never to receive the spam that keeps on changing. Blacklists like SpamCon and DSBL can be used with this software. Like other software the attachments can also be scanned and specific attachments can be rejected. Regular expressions can be used for keyword filtering in this software. It can also work with third party anti virus scanners. Spam that are sent with fake email ids of your domain are rejected by this software. Real time statistics are available with this anti spam software.

SurfControl Email Filter

Another anti spam software that works with SMTP mail server and that can be integrated with Exchange server, as a plug-in is the SurfControl Email Filter software from surfcontrol.com. This anti spam software can also be used as a standalone gateway. Tools for content filtering and to protect emails from viruses and other threats are integrated with this software.

Conclusion

The pricing of the above anti spam solutions are usually above $200 and it also depends on the number of users / recipients or the number of license needed for the software. Some of the software is priced per server. Depending on the number of servers to which it is deployed the pricing may vary. It is better to look at the features of these anti spam solutions and then choose one that suits your requirement.