Symantec Brightmail Antispam

[Jay Bollyn]

Symantec Brightmail Antispam

Anyone have experience with Symantec Brightmail Antispam? We are testing it, expect to roll it out sometime soon to a couple thousand users.

http://www.symantec.com/Products/enterprise?c=prodinfo&refId=835

Thanks for any info.

- Jay

[Richard Ward_6 · Accepted solution]

I am quite sure that is what we use for our Government of New Brunswick (Canada) MS Exchange system with great success. It filters out over 90% of the spam. I have not seen any stats on it lately but it works very well.

[Jay Bollyn]

Thanks Richard,

Our test group has had very good results also. But we all know, one cannot do too much testing. (Hate to have this thing blow up in my face when we roll it out.)

Anyone else have experience with either this server product or a competitor's product?

- Jay

[Jeffrey Killian]

I also have had exp with the product. It was very good at blocking most spam, although manual maintenence of blocking lists was required. I created a personal blacklist server to supliment use of external black list (i.e. SpamHaus.org) organizations. Symantec has since introduced a subscription update service (for fee) that I suspect would greatly reduce the need for manual list maintenance.

[Nick Walton]

Hi Jay,

I am using the Symantec Premium AntiSpam service in conjunction with SMS for Exchange v5 and the Microsoft Intelligent Message filter for Eschange. I am not sure if "Premium AntiSpam" is the exact same product as "Brightmail AntiSpam". Can anyone confirm or correct me?

One issue I have with it is that I get a conflict between the antivirus functionality and the antispam functionality. Once in a blue moon an email will arrive which is first classified as probably spam. This is routed through to the recipient's Junk E-mail folder in Outlook. The problem is that it is definitely carrying a virus and so is immediately actioned by the antivirus engine. I have it set to delete it completely. The delivery engine then tries to re-deliver the same message 5 minutes later. And this loop will continue forever (or until I manually delete the queued message). Symantec have not yet come up with a fix for this behaviour.

I also have problems at the moment with "unscannable file" actions on perfectly good emails on SMS 5 which Symantec are working on as we speak. Nothing to do with Premium AntiSpam though.

So, a good product but not without its weaknesses.

Remember you may want to roll out the Outlook plug-in to your users so that they can supply feedback on false positives and missed spam to Symantec.

Nick.

[Igor Karasik]

Jay,
We have two antivirus/content security vendors in our organization: Symantec (Symantec antivirus corporate edition) and Esafe (Esafe Gateway). Before decide to which antispam product we going we check Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam, Esafe advanced antispam and Microsoft Exchange IMF.
My opinion that Symantec AntiSpam is best, we finally going now to Esafe only because high price for Symantec. Microsoft Exchange IMF is worst in my opinion, but maybe Exchange 2003 sp2 with IMF built-in improve situation.
Also, Internet reviews I see about Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam indicate very low false positives - IMHO the most important antispam feature.

[Jay Bollyn]

Thanks for the excellent comments so far. I will keep this open for awhile.

I think Brightmail will turn out to be an excellent choice for my network, especially since we are already running Symantec Anti-Virus Corp Edition v10.

We are in the process of migrating thousands of *nix email accts to MS Exchange 2003. I should probably start another thread about that.

- Jay

[Phytorian]

Hi Jay,

I wanted to let you know that Brightmail and Premium is basically the same thing. Now I have used both and Brightmail crashes frequently. Premium works better for some reason. When using SMS 5.0 (Antivirus for exchange and Antispam Premium) and MS Exchange SP2 content filter you are almost shield completely. I have 98% accuracy with this guys combine.

I hope this info helps

[Jay Bollyn]

thanks all