For those that don't get Brain Livingston's Windows Secrets Newsletter (https://windowssecrets.com) he had a review of this hardware which is a one-time purchase of $1,000 for a very small & silent (no moving parts) box that spam-checks inbound mail before it gets to your mail server (or in our case, GFI Mail Essentials to do further spam detection).
His review was extremely complimentary and inspired me to buy one for my office - I like that there are no annual renewals! Here is how Brian describes how it works: "Deep Six does not perform "content filtering" to compute a spam score based on the words found in a message's body or headers. Instead, the DS200 performs "connection rating." It accepts or rejects any distant server's attempt to make a connection (called a Simple Mail Transport Protocol or SMTP connection) solely according to the characteristics of the sending server. One way Deep Six does this is by checking the IP address of the distant server to see if it is on one of several dozen "real-time block lists." The DS200, however, does not disconnect a server merely because its IP address appears on a single list, as many antispam schemes do. Instead, according to a source close to Deep Six Technologies, the device is programmed to use a "network decision tree." The inclusion of an IP address on Block List A might not cause Deep Six to drop an SMTP connection attempt. But if the IP address is also on Block Lists C and E, then the sending server is considered to a spam bot. (Our source requested not to be identified by name, saying this technique is the subject of two U.S. patent applications and the details of the technology have not yet been made public.) The DS200 also resolves "close calls" in an effective way. If a sending server might or might not be a spam server, based on the decision tree, Deep Six asks the sending server to re-try the SMTP connection a few seconds later. Legitimate e-mail servers do this automatically, following well-understood Internet mail standards. Spam servers, however, are programmed not to bother. Sending millions of pieces of spam per day is far more important to spammers than wasting any time responding to SMTP retry requests." --- My experience is as follows: We currently use GFI's Mail Essentials v11 installed on a server. Last month it reported that we received an average of 18,662 messages a day. Of those, 99% were identified as spam by GFI. Last Friday I set up our DS200, put it on the LAN, then switched the Firewall to point to it (all during business hours and no problems were experienced). Yesterday the number of messages hitting GFI showed a drop to 3,317 messages, with 90% of those being identified as spam by GFI. I currently have the spam threshold on the DS200 set to 15 but plan on reducing this one point every week or so until I get to 10 (unless it causes too many false positives). All-in-all it has been very impressive and I thoroughly recommend it. If anyone else is interested, you can order the DS200 from their distributor at http://tyrnstone.com/emailfilter.asp (I have no affiliation, just wanted to pass on the info) Alex -- ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Is your picture included in the Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page? http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html If not, write to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
