Attacking spam at the network's edge

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While desktop-based antispam software is widely used to keep unwanted, unsolicited mail in check, savvy corporate network managers now are pushing the onus of blocking spam out to their mail gateways. By blocking unwanted e-mail before it hits the corporate mail server, these products lighten the spam load on servers, system managers and end users.

We tested two products of this ilk that were introduced at IDG Executive Forums Demo last week in Scottsdale, Ariz. On the hot seat were Cloudmark's Authority and MailFrontier's Anti-Spam Gateway (ASG).

We conducted our tests at Opus One, a Network World Global Test Alliance member and e-mail and security consultancy, and found half the mail during our weeklong test period was spam (49.5%, to be precise). Both products can decrease the amount of spam substantially. Depending on your settings and product choice, between 80% and 90% of the spam coming into your corporate servers can be deflected.

However, based on our overall assessment of these products, they have a ways to go before they're ready for the typical enterprise deployment. Both take the decision of tuning what is and is not spam away from end users. This is a serious shortcoming because the inability to look through quarantined messages would be a major problem for any company that relies on e-mail for more than casual communications.

MailFrontier did an outstanding job of picking out spam - detecting 86% of the spam fired at it over seven days. But its dependence on Exchange and Outlook in this first version of the product and the requirement to add software to end users' systems, as well as some holes in its whitelist management strategy, counteract its superior spam identification algorithms.

On the other hand, Cloudmark's low-overhead, low-maintenance application looks more elegant, but has many of the same per-user customization problems as MailFrontier. Worse, of course, is the relatively spotty performance of Cloudmark's spam identification algorithm compared with the benchmark MailFrontier set.

Both companies have acknowledged they need to go further in letting users verify and control their spam, and plan to solve these problems in the next release of their products.