4 Responses to “Another Thursday Afternoon Question (Still Before 12, but I’m Hungry)”

1. By The Slothman on Jun 21, 2007 | Reply

   Oh do I have one for you.

   It requires VMWare Server/Player. It is an appliance as I’ve posted before about them.

   We had the same problem, only much less spam then what you’re getting. Then I tried this:

   ESVA’s Anti Spam Appliance

   This thing is the cat’s pajamas!

   It is VERY easy to configure and set up. What you need to do is set this up as an inbound(you can do outbound as well) gateway. You point the Mailscanner app to your mail server and it forwards straight in while scanning for viruses, trojans, spam, malware, etc.

   You will need to change your MX record to the IP you give the appliance to make sure mail wont go to your email server directly.

   It will take about 48hrs for the MX to fully propagate so mail no longer goes to the server, but when it does you will find the load and impact on your server will be greatly reduced.

   The ESVA does tune itself. It will learn your habits. It has the ability to whitelist individuals and IP address ranges. It also sends a message when a prospective spam is found, it give you the option of releasing it. Viruses are stripped out and the file extensions that are allowed are VERY stringent. It is very configurable and you can add many domains to it, I currently host about 7 on ours.

   It also provides graphs to show you how much of what is being blocked and how it is handled. A really great FREE application.

   Since I put the application in play last November we have rejected over 500,000 bad connection attempts, and flagged 70,000 spam messages.

   We are a smaller firm, and don’t have a lot of traffic per se, but the numbers are about this: prior to the ESVA being put in, over 80% of our email was spam, as out emails received have dropped by 80%!

   Think of the load on processing cycles, and disc space that is saving???

   Hope this helps.

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2. By Karl L. Gechlik on Jun 21, 2007 | Reply

   That looks very interesting Sloth - we are using the Barracuda SPAM Firewall 300.

   This thing is amazing definately not free like Sloths idea but we filter almost 500,000 daily down to 12,000 real non spam messages. The appliance cost us around $1000 and $800 for a years worth of support and updates.

   It downloads spam defintions hourly and has lots of powerful features.

   Look at me I sound like a sales rep!

   Commission please!
   Brracuda Networks

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3. By The Slothman on Jun 21, 2007 | Reply

   The ‘cuda is the defacto spam filter….should have mentioned that.

   It can be a bit flaky though and testy with some mail domains. But by and large it is the best commercial offering out there.

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4. By GettingSpammed on Jun 21, 2007 | Reply

   the barracuda looks good but it seems like it is out of our price range

   im downloading this esva and vmware server player now.

   thank u guys for your fast suggestins

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