SpamStopsHere is a hosted, third part anti-spam solution that uses innovative algorithms to detect spam and zap it before it reaches your servers. In addition to blocking spam, SpamStopsHere can hold your email in the event that your email server is unavailable, and forward it along when the server comes back up.

Note: This review was performed based on an account that the author’s employer pays for.

Specifications

Who’s it for?

Any email administrator will tell you that wrangling spam takes a significant amount of their time. In theory, the systems should be “set and forget,” but between technical problems, false positives, and the need to constantly adjust settings to minimize spam, it is not that easy. SpamStopsHere let’s these busy administrators spend their time on other tasks by eliminating the spam problem.

What problems does it solve?

Most spam filters operate on the same principles, and the spammers are constantly adjusting their strategies to get the spam through. As a result, the typical spam filter lets in a lot of spam while accidentally blocking enough legitimate email to be a problem. As a result, email administrators are constantly researching lost emails, hearing complaints about too much spam, and spending time tweaking spam rules. SpamStopsHere uses inventive algorithms that significantly improve accuracy, which lowers the spam levels as well as drastically reducing the rate of false positives.

Standout features

  • Accuracy: After months of usage, I can tell you that SpamStopsHere works as advertised. I have seen dramatic improvements in incoming spam levels, and near elimination of false positives. There is little need to adjust settings once they have been set.
  • Email Holding: SpamStopsHere will store your incoming emails if your email server is down and send it through when your email server comes online again.
  • Full Featured: All of the functionality you would expect from an anti-spam solution like optional anti-virus, quarantines, and whitelists are here.

What’s wrong?

  • Cost: If you are used to a one-time purchase price product, or a free/open source product, you will have to learn to accept the need to pony up some money for SpamStopsHere.
  • Third-Party Service: Some companies may not be comfortable with or able to allow a third-party service to process their email.

Competitive products

Bottom line for business

The most important thing you need to know about SpamStopsHere, is that it works. Prior to installing SpamStopsHere, my experience with using a combination of a third-party SpamAssassin installation supported by Exchange’s built-in anti-spam features was that Exchange was holding roughly 175,000 spam emails on a rolling two week basis, and users were still complaining about getting tons of email and false positives.

After putting SpamStopsHere in place, the rolling two week spam average has dropped to about 750 messages, users have stopped complaining about email, and there has only been one false positive that we know of. In addition, we are no longer looking at upgrading our incoming email server since it is no longer overwhelmed by incoming spam.

SpamStopsHere is not only accurate, but by working as a third-party service, it alleviates a huge amount of burden from your incoming email servers. Performing spam filtering and virus scanning consume a large amount of CPU power, so by reducing the levels of incoming email by pre-filtering spam, your email servers can breathe easier.

Does SpamStopsHere cost money? Yes, it does. The amount of time that the average email administrator spends wrangling spam easily costs many times what the SpamStopsHere service costs. Given that the accuracy of SpamStopsHere is so good, it is a bargain compared to “free” alternatives. SpamStopsHere offers a free trial as well, and it only takes a few minutes to configure.

User rating

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Options

As you can see, SpamStopsHere provides a large number of options. These are very close to the default options (I added a whitelisted sender and an in-house spam quarantine to send quarantined items to).

Verify email

SpamStopsHere provides a convenient utility to verify that your incoming email server is online and configured properly to work with SpamStopsHere.

Web interface

In the event that an email slips through their filter, you can email it to SpamStopsHere, or report it via this Web interface.

Statistics

SpamStopsHere provides a neat statistics section. It is fairly depressing to see that less than 1% of incoming email is legitimate.

Quarantine

SpamStopsHere also provides a quarantine service, should you choose to use it. You can even provide each user with their own quarantine login, so that you can escape the “where did my email go?” routine.

Filtering

This right here is SpamStopsHere’s secret sauce, the URL and phone number filtering. It scans the email for any URLs or phone numbers, and checks it against a list of URLs that spammers and scammers want you to visit and phone numbers that they want you to call.