We moved our domains over to the ExchangeDefender E-mail Hygiene and Reputation Services Provider not quite three weeks ago now.
One of the first things that got noticed was the drastic reduction of junk showing up in our Junk Mail folders. By drastic reduction, we mean maybe 1 piece of spam for every couple of days!
Another change is the elimination of illicit SMTP connections to our SBS (previous blog post) based Exchange server as ISA now only allows SMTP connections from the ExchangeDefender servers.
The ExchangeDefender reports are amazing. They show how much e-mail is spam, and how much is not. They give our clients and us a pretty good idea of how much time we are saving by not having to deal with spam!
Ultimately, we no longer need to deal with all of that spam which is a huge time waster when we look at the amount of time spent sifting through the garbage everyday!
The other aspect to having our outbound e-mail passing through the ExchangeDefender servers is no longer needing to monitor black lists for our IP address or IP subnet on all of the blacklists that are out there. That in turn means that we no longer need to jump through all of the hoops required to take our IP off of a blacklist.
The big time waster when it comes to having our IP address blacklisted is the inability to send e-mail to any domain that subscribes to that blacklist. We would then end up waiting hours, days even, before our IP was considered “safe” by the recipient’s e-mail servers once we found the blacklist site and its Remove IP feature.
The ExchangeDefender service is worth it for both our clients and us. That is why we signed up with OWN as a Service Provider!
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac!
2 comments:
Of course these arguments are valid for any hosted anti-spam product on the market - I am currently using McAfee's Total Protection Service which is a hosted package and includes hosted email filtering.
Prior to that I used Symantec Hosted Mail Security, and while not a huge fan of Symantec's products, this one was a winner.
I did try Trend's Hosted Email Reputation Services but found that product severely lacking in configuration options (none!) and reporting abilities.
Daniel,
We tried the Trend product too and it did not do to well all.
Our mind on this subject is to pick a product that is not a part of an overall suite of products.
Given our experience in the industry, those that try to be all things for all people tend to meet the average, or a bit above the average, ability to come through with their products.
Those that have a specific product focus, such as ExchangeDefender, tend to go way beyond the average. That is because the product is all they do. They do have other products in the same line of offerings, and they are excellent too.
Thanks for the comment,
Philip
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