How can I see what it's doing?

 

SPAMfighter offers daily/weekly/monthly statistics via email and the web interface, allowing the administrator to see a huge amount of detail including:

 

• Total Email Processed
• SPAM Blocked
• Mail to SPAM ratio
• Etc

 

Here's an example of a monthly mail an administrator may receive:

 

What I do like:

• SPAM protection may be switched on or off for users individually. Same with the built in AV support.
• The Community feature - makes traditional methods of SPAM protection look decidedly "old"
• Reporting capabilities in SEM (daily/weekly/monthly statistical information on email, "latest news"-updates, etc
• Outlook client integration which feed's back into the entire global SEM community. Mail that is marked or unmarked as SPAM reflects to the benefit of the entire user base.

 

What I don't like:

• SEM is a specialized anti SPAM product, providing no hardening of the server at all. Note that this is not a problem with SEM as such, but a personal preference of mine to see more value to the Exchange administrator.
• SEM allows the administrator to see what mail was blocked. While this feature in itself is great, currently there's no facility for the user to see what mail was blocked for themselves, nor is there a mechanism to release mail which may have been classified in error.
• While email reporting is a great feature, I don't have a configurable report view in the admin portal beyond the current month. This means if I don't keep all my emailed reports I lose my monthly history.
• Reporting including the type of SPAM/phishing emails blocked. More detail on this may reveal the source of SPAM and allow the administrator to educate their user base about what not to do with their email addresses in a public setting.

 

In Summary

You're either going to love what SEM does, or feel like something's missing. SEM handles SPAM in a non traditional manner which is certainly worth investigating. The installed user base offers great feedback and a much quicker response to SPAM classification compared to a lot of other products on the market, especially straight after the product is installed and it doesn't need to learn what's "normal" in your environment as many other filters do.

SEM may be downloaded at http://www.spamfighter.com/Product_Servers.asp

 

About the Author

Nicolas Blank is a Microsoft Infrastructure Architect and Operations Director for Credo Technical Services and specializes in Exchange, Active Directory, architecture, systems management, migration and scripting. Nicolas is a Microsoft MVP for Exchange and spends what spare time he has writing, blogging and talking about Exchange and associated technologies.