Arriving at the right anti-spam solution for your company is very much akin to reading a map -- if you have to go somewhere, you will have to be able to put your finger onto some place on that map. To arrive at the best possible anti-spam solution, you will have to justify the need of having one in the first place and the article titled How spam affects an organization could possible help you justify that. Here are some main types of anti-spam solutions available in the market.
Software Bundles: The software bundles provided by most vendors are by far, the easiest types to understand, implement and operate. These are necessarily software programs that can be deployed onto your servers or email-servers within the company and then set rules by which the software will begin to work to save from floods of spam that will inevitably occur.
Appliance Model: Think of the appliance model as something like a firewall set-up. This appliance sits in between the Internet connection and the enterprise mail servers, acting like a dedicated email firewall and this scrutinizes ever incoming email message using a set of pre-defined rules. It stops or allows these messages into the system based on those rules and takes a decision of this sort for each message.
Application Service providers: ASP (Application Service Providers) are into a lot of deliverables now-a-days and the anti-spam models only make sense to be into some of these vendors. The actual application sits on another server entirely, located remotely and we are just buying a data service here, specifically email-filtering and anti-spam solutions. This operates just like the appliance model, except that the server is located elsewhere and this works out to be a cost-effective and no-risk solution for most businesses. The only glitch here is you will end up depending on these service providers for your needs.
Client-Only Model or individual set-ups: If you have a few users within your company, investing heavily into any of the types mentioned before won’t make any economic sense. In these cases, a client-only model is best considered. You could install this on workstations as and when needed and each of these installations can be customized based on individual needs. Also, these packages can be installed only when users complain of spam and that saves costs too. However, as a downside, there is no central management in this case and no reporting capability too. You must also keep in mind that this solution still loads your email servers because the spam is controlled at the desktop level and that would mean that the email servers still had to do the job of processing the email.