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IO540
23rd Mar 2010, 18:43
After years of trying everything on our in-house email server, including the TMDA challenge-response system, and having suffered countless DOS attacks and anything up to 10k spams/day, we have finally capitulated and signed up to Messagelabs for £420/year.

This does up to 10 users (distinct user mailboxes) with no apparent limit on the # of domains which receive email, and no apparent limit on the # of aliases on each domain.

It works amazingly well.

Their claims for false positives (real emails dumped) are astonishing at 1/300k or better, which is why I went for it, because we have customers in countries which are routinely blacklisted by the standard blacklists.

The config of the service is really clunky though... but once set up, it is fine and adding/removing users is really easy.

mixture
24th Mar 2010, 00:06
You should have tried Brightmail on your in-house server ! I hope you weren't paying someone for anti-spam advice, especially given the type of things you've tried (challenge response = waste of time, incredibly frustrating for genuine senders ... everyone knows that) !

Messagelabs are OK, but quite expensive.

The Spamhaus Project (http://www.spamhaus.org/) is awsome if correctly implemented .... best of all, it's free for low volumes and dirt cheap for higher volumes (what message labs charges you for 10 users would probably get you a 500 user private feed from them).

(And no, I've no interest in Brightmail or Spamhaus ..... have just had a great deal of success with both products in various scenarios).

Of course, services such as MesssageLabs, Postini etc. do have other potential benefits which you may place more or less value on ....... but I'm not going to go into any more detail here..... there should always be some stuff left as an "exercise to the reader" when it comes to freebie forum tips. :cool:

IO540
28th Mar 2010, 09:39
services such as MesssageLabs, Postini etc. do have other potential benefits

what are they?

A relative lack of reliance on dumb blacklists, which make most spam filtering services drop all emails from whole countries or foreign ISPs, might be one of them ;)

Filters just don't work anymore - well they do but with masses of false positives which is no good for a business which cannot afford to lose emails from new contacts.

Most spam today comes from bots (zombie PCs) i.e. legitimate senders. They are not on dynamic IPs either; they are sending via their ISPs (legitimate senders).