Discussion on:

Blocked spam hits a new record

Our office uses Messaging Architects GwGuardian for GroupWise and for 2007 total received email was 8,105,000 and of that 7,273,000 was rejected as spam. That's about 90% rejection and in the remainder there is still some spam that gets through, although it is a trivial amount. I'm not sure I am seeing an increase in the amount of spam compared to the previous year where it seemed we were receiving over a million emails a month. Spam is a really big problem and I pity the IT department that isn't using some type of filtering before it reaches their email servers.

Does anyone know how SpamAssassin compares (percentage wise) in its effectiveness, compared to the commercial offerings referred to above?

I admin a very small network with 7 users. Email accounts for four of the users have been around for several years. Email was hopeless because of the endless amount of incomming spam. Users refused to change their email addresses. I signed up for Netriplex Antispam service for $19.99/mo, The service service blocks between 3,500-4,000 spam emails everyday before they even reach my server. The accuracy of their spam filer is amazing. I have been using the service for 6 months and can only count a total of 5 legitimate emails that were blocked from my inbox during that period. All users realized it was a godsend after adding the service, as they open up their inboxes to only see work related emails and nothing else.

I have fine turned the service a little at a time and now it is nearly perfect. Truely, 98.5% of all email received is spam. I think it is definety worth the $20/month to just capture that 1.5% and leave the rest behind.

Company: DCI in Dayton OH.

I used to hear horror stories about Postini from their early days, but I've been using Postini with the same ISP now for over two years. The web interface is intuitive and allowing or blocking senders is easy. There are even provisions for allowing group mailings (mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.)

The corporate mail client is Outlook Web Access, so I strongly suspect the spam filter is affiliated with MS Exchange. The filter will let me know a message has been blocked and send me the subject line, sender of the email, and the first line or two of text (if any) from the email. The configuration is stupid, though. The filter provides me with links to view, deliver, or delete the email, but the links are deactivated "for my protection." One of the consistently blocked emails is the monthly newsletter from the corporate perks partner; I receive no response from the postmaster when I complain...

Edit: spelchex

Small plugin for Exchange, is HIGHLY configurable, tons of filtering options. I love this tool, it works great and so simple to implement! has its own build in statistics and reporting as well. Our spam ratio here is about 98% with just under 100 mailboxes.