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Frontbridge Technologies Inc.s TrueProtect Message Management Suite and SpamShark service stand out as solid anti-spamware, and after two months of real-world testing, the duo earns eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice honors for the enterprise market.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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FrontBridge TrueProtect Suite
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Although no junk-mail filtering service is 100 percent effective—the best services stop only about 90 percent of the spam—FrontBridges TrueProtect Suite performs with the best. What sets TrueProtect apart from its competitors is its network topology, its reliability and its ability to host quarantine spam off corporate users e-mail systems. |
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EVALUATION SHORT LIST |
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Spam-killer services such as FrontBridges TrueProtect, which includes anti-virus and spam filters (SpamShark is the anti-spam component), take over the mail exchange record at the ISP and route e-mail through the service rather than directly through the corporate gateway.
TrueProtect costs $1.50 to $3 per person per month. Competitive products can be less expensive. Postini Inc.s Perimeter Manager, for example, costs less than $1.50 per person per month.
The TrueProtect suite uses a heuristics-based, three-step methodology to track spam. It first uses a proprietary blacklist (known spammers) to block out the worst offenders. It then uses fingerprinting—scanning the message for spamlike attributes. Finally, it scores the message based on FrontBridges proprietary methodology.
Unlike most services, TrueProtect gives users the option of having FrontBridge host their spam, thereby freeing their mail servers. FrontBridge calls this the spam quarantine, and its the way we tested the service.
This spam hosting allows users to look at quarantined messages via a Web browser. If viruses get by the filter, theyre not dumped onto a client system, where they can replicate and spread. To see their quarantined messages, users must access SpamShark.
We performed our test on a local domain account and set up TrueProtect to quarantine messages. We turned on the suites virus-filtering capabilities (which use Trend Micro Inc. technology) and set up TrueProtect to block most foreign character sets.
TrueProtects administrator interface is nearly devoid of bells and whistles. Competitors generally provide a more option-rich dashboard-style interface.
We also tested TrueProtect in conjunction with a larger company. On the personal domain, TrueProtect processed approximately 1,000 messages over the testing period, and it flagged more than two-thirds as spam. For the larger corporation, TrueProtect processed 3.5 million messages and quarantined about 2.3 million of them. That equates to eliminating two-thirds of the e-mail load on the mail servers.
On the user side, some junk mail continued to sneak through; for the personal domain, it was virtually eliminated, with no false positives. On the corporate side, some users were still getting 20 to 30 spam messages per day, including some extremely well-known spam. However, weve experienced this issue with all the filtering services weve seen.
FrontBridge sets itself apart in the reliability of its network with multiple independent processing facilities. Also, even if a corporate e-mail system goes down, FrontBridge continues to host the mail in its data centers, ensuring there is no loss.
eWEEK Labs Director John Taschek can be reached at john_ [email protected].