SPAM Filtering with Zimbra

dave_c

In the past I used SpamExperts; I don't know the current price but it used to be per domain, not per mail address. Just consider that it is now owned by Solarwinds.

Depending of the situation:

rspamd, works very well but needs to be configured properly. It is used in mailcow, I like it.
SpamAssassin + things.
Otherwise, whatever comes with the email service, like the default anti SPAM of Office 365
Mixed results, no doubt. You know, the more work I put on configuration and training the better results.

On the enterprise side, I have heard great things about Mimecast (obviously), Roaring Penguin and Cyren

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

In the past I used SpamExperts; I don't know the current price but it used to be per domain, not per mail address. Just consider that it is now owned by Solarwinds.

Oh yeah, good point. That's a show stopper here. We have had serious legal issues with Solarwinds and won't consider any product they've tainted. Serious ethical and legal problems.

StuartJordan

@scottalanmiller said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

@dave_c said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

In the past I used SpamExperts; I don't know the current price but it used to be per domain, not per mail address. Just consider that it is now owned by Solarwinds.

Oh yeah, good point. That's a show stopper here. We have had serious legal issues with Solarwinds and won't consider any product they've tainted. Serious ethical and legal problems.

That doesn't sound good!

scottalanmiller

@StuartJordan said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

@scottalanmiller said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

@dave_c said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

In the past I used SpamExperts; I don't know the current price but it used to be per domain, not per mail address. Just consider that it is now owned by Solarwinds.

Oh yeah, good point. That's a show stopper here. We have had serious legal issues with Solarwinds and won't consider any product they've tainted. Serious ethical and legal problems.

That doesn't sound good!

Yeah, we had to threaten a lawsuit several times. They repeatedly got involved in "slamming"... creating false bills (we were never a customer at all), threatening us, sent us to collections, etc. The only person from their company allowed to talk to us is their corporate counsel in London. Anyone else contacts us again is immediate legal action. It took years and they finally admitted that they had been lying about fixing the fake accounts and were using that to stall to get money from the collections people.

StuartJordan

@scottalanmiller I've been getting a calls of these recently as well as Comodo. It doesn't seem to be just one call either. I find their sales team quite pushy.

scottalanmiller

@StuartJordan said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

@scottalanmiller I've been getting a calls of these recently as well as Comodo. It doesn't seem to be just one call either. I find their sales team quite pushy.

We had no legal issues with Comodo, but we used to work with their products and stopped because their sales process was so intrusive that it made their products "too costly" to consider using. The products were okay, but not worth it for us.

bbigford

@DustinB3403 said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

Here come the recommendations for Barracuda Spam Filter (physical on premise). . .

Definitely not physical, but they aren't a clear winner.

There are definitely some caveats with their hosted service. Barracuda has been kind of a weird company... they have some of the best support I've ever had, and it's American so there is no language barrier. But CONSTANTLY buggy... the saving grace is you call support, get someone in 10 seconds, and they say something to the tune of "we've got a bug report on that already, it should be resolved soon", and within about 24 hours or less it's resolved.

I've considered it a company designed by engineers, for engineers. Everything I expect is there:

Highly customizable products.
No-language-barrier support, and able to reach someone quickly.
If there's a bug and you know about it, be transparent.

One gripe I have with their cloud filtering though, is for quarantines every email is treated like a person... including distribution lists. If a distribution group is reachable externally and has 20 users, you will have 20 people resetting that quarantine password every time guaranteed. Another gripe I have is with their email encryption section; I can never remember to escape characters... if you use [SECURE] as the content policy filter in the subject (prepended for encrypted email) and forget to escape [ and ] then send anything with the individual letters S-E-C-U-R-E in the subject then you're going to end up with every single message encrypted with any of those letters in the subject. [SECURE] has to be escaped as \ [SECURE\ ] or it won't work how you want it; fixable, but not the most intuitive at a glance... even a pro tip of "you need to escape characters" would be acceptable.

Other than that, their services are pretty affordable with a decent budget and some good features. Competitors on the same tier would be ProofPoint (though they are starting to show their age while also lacking innovation) and MimeCast (very decent, I put them only slightly behind Barracuda). I put MimeCast slightly behind Barracuda because their main selling point is an Outlook add-in... that's dumb and difficult to manage with lots of users since add-ins are a notorious ticket-generating headache. But I would say MimeCast and Barracuda are still very close in terms of cost and functionality; can't speak to MimeCast support but I hear decent things.

dbeato

@bbigford said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

@DustinB3403 said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

Here come the recommendations for Barracuda Spam Filter (physical on premise). . .

Definitely not physical, but they aren't a clear winner.

There are definitely some caveats with their hosted service. Barracuda has been kind of a weird company... they have some of the best support I've ever had, and it's American so there is no language barrier. But CONSTANTLY buggy... the saving grace is you call support, get someone in 10 seconds, and they say something to the tune of "we've got a bug report on that already, it should be resolved soon", and within about 24 hours or less it's resolved.

I've considered it a company designed by engineers, for engineers. Everything I expect is there:

Highly customizable products.

No-language-barrier support, and able to reach someone quickly.

If there's a bug and you know about it, be transparent.

One gripe I have with their cloud filtering though, is for quarantines every email is treated like a person... including distribution lists. If a distribution group is reachable externally and has 20 users, you will have 20 people resetting that quarantine password every time guaranteed. Another gripe I have is with their email encryption section; I can never remember to escape characters... if you use [SECURE] as the content policy filter in the subject (prepended for encrypted email) and forget to escape [ and ] then send anything with the individual letters S-E-C-U-R-E in the subject then you're going to end up with every single message encrypted with any of those letters in the subject. [SECURE] has to be escaped as \ [SECURE\ ] or it won't work how you want it; fixable, but not the most intuitive at a glance... even a pro tip of "you need to escape characters" would be acceptable.

Other than that, their services are pretty affordable with a decent budget and some good features. Competitors on the same tier would be ProofPoint (though they are starting to show their age while also lacking innovation) and MimeCast (very decent, I put them only slightly behind Barracuda). I put MimeCast slightly behind Barracuda because their main selling point is an Outlook add-in... that's dumb and difficult to manage with lots of users since add-ins are a notorious ticket-generating headache. But I would say MimeCast and Barracuda are still very close in terms of cost and functionality; can't speak to MimeCast support but I hear decent things.