Short version: No. Those of you who've been here awhile, no need to read further.
Long version: I'll have to agree with Matt on every count here. IMHO, If you want an effective anti-spam solution but don't want to spend allot of hours maintaining it and responding to false positives, Imail's anti-spam will not do the trick. We upgraded to the latest version and I was excited that finally I would have some control over the spam. Much to my dismay, every single spam test was ineffectual or worse, caught many valid emails and required much of my time tweaking the lists to increase effectiveness and decrease errors. We could not use the DNS Blacklist test as our Imail install is behind an email gateway that masked the sender's IP address(there are other products that can get around this). There are many things about the Imail Anti-Spam that I don't like that I won't go on about the details. Suffice it to say that another application will be needed. There are a few programs that interface with Imail and enhance(really replace) Imail's spam handling. There are other programs that handle the spam before Imail ever sees the email. While I have heard great things about the programs that interface with Imail, none of them are free AFAIK. I was about to try a couple of those programs that many use here to interface with Imail, most of them provide a trial period. Then I read about ASSP. Since it was free and got rave reviews, I decided to give it a try, and have been pleasantly surprised at it's effectiveness and 0 false positive rate. There is allot to like about ASSP(http://assp.sourceforge.net) so I won't go in to much detail, but do want to mention a couple of things. ASSP, like the retail products, can place a statement in the subject to identify spam. This makes it much easier to implement without obstructing any mail but still gives the ability for end-users to easily see that it is working and add rules to redirect the spam messages. Secondly, one thing I found out recently, when a mail server connects to ASSP and it gets rejected by either a dangerous attachment you are blocking, or by being spam, a bounce message is not generated by you mail server. Rather, an error code is sent back to the connecting mail server and it is up to them to generate the bounce message and use their bandwidth and processing cycles. So by using ASSP as the gateway and when blocking spam, which I am not doing yet, you can reduce your mailserver's load substantially(if you are getting loads of spam, and who isn't). After we run for a while and I can provide stats that prove ASSP is doing it's job well, I will move it into the lead position as our gateway and move our current gateway, a viruswall, into position behind it and before Imail. ASSP also has a support system based on the mail list and two different forums at sourceforge. They are not as active as this forum, but they have provided me help when I needed it. And lastly, ASSP only does Bayesian filtering. It does have a list of known spammy IP's they call the greylist(which gets downloaded from their site regularly) but if they are in the email, it merely adds them as a high counting spam word to the Bayesian score. While this has proven to be very accurate in our small worl, if you are not a fan of Beyesian filtering, or your user base is too diverse to build an effective spam word database, try one of the retail products, or build another system to be your email gateway and set up Imgate for just the cost of the hardware. Imail is a great email package. It has been very stable for our application and has been very trouble free, just don't spend too much time trying to get it to work as an effective anti-spam. Ipswitch is trying to provide this, but there are too many alternate solutions that work worlds better for little to no additional cost and take up substantially less of your time. Later, Douglas Traylor MIS Department Harbison-Fischer Mfg Co. (817)297-2211 x210 Damn I get runonitis at times! :o) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Robertson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 1:05 PM Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Imail Anti-Spam... Worthwhile??? > I tried mightily to make Imail anti-spam work in my general-population, > small ISP system. Too many false positives and too much maintenance > time required to keep it up. I eventually gave up on it, I'm afraid. > > I'm a longtime Declude user (JM Pro, A/V Std with F-Prot), since well > before v8. It's a great product as has been stated here repeatedly. > > The best free solution, imho, is ASSP. That product is absolutely > amazing. It has almost wiped out spam and, after an initial break-in > period, runs by itself with no babysitting required. If only Imail's > Bayesian component was so well done I'd be an even happier camper. To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
