Spam-fighting Outlook alternative

IBM/Lotus and Microsoft are always locked in a battle to hijack each other's discontented e-mail customers, but there are alternatives to the big guys for those that have had enough of forklift migrations, creative licensing and waiting for the next version that won't ship until "customers" say it's ready.

Well, one of those alternatives has just hit the shelf. Rockliffe's MailSite 6 is now available and loaded with an interesting new anti-spam feature that blocks spammers from harvesting (read stealing) e-mail addresses from corporate mail servers.

Rockliffe's Directory Harvest Attack Protection feature keeps watch on MailSite's Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connection and detects large blocks of e-mail messages coming from the same IP address. In the default setting, if half of the first 100 e-mails coming from a specific IP address have invalid addresses the connection is dropped and the sender's IP address is added to a blacklist. These harvest attacks are known to chew up CPU cycles on corporate servers, so blocking them may make e-mail delivery just a bit smoother.

And in the long run, it just might help trim a small slice out of the spam flowing into end-users' mailboxes.

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