GFI MailEssentials: An Excellent Anti-Spam and Email Security Solution

Businesses today face a variety of challenges due to both increasing email use and criminals leveraging electronic messaging to invade your organization. Further, advertisers can fill mailboxes with hundreds of messages per day, adversely affecting employee productivity. Simple and effective tools are needed to manage these challenges. They should support a set of capabilities designed to protect employees, and the business, from both known and emerging threats. Capabilities should include:

• Ability to learn about an organization's email habits, minimizing false positives
• Support for both blacklisting and whitelisting
• Anti-phishing protection
• Easy user interaction, if an organization chooses to allow it
• Centralized management, including search and email release functions
• Zero-day spam protection

In this review, I rate how well MailEssentials meets these challenges. The review is based on an online demo of the product and independent anti-spam research.

MailEssentials supports Exchange, Lotus Notes, and other SMTP-based solutions, providing multi-engine spam filtering, anti-phishing protection, and business policy enforcement.

Using MailEssentials, an organization can manage spam in various ways. First, use of SpamRazor, as a supplement to the core engine, helps achieve the 98 percent blocking rate claimed by GFI.

Next, bayesian filtering provides zero-day protection from new spam. Inspecting outgoing mail, the filter learns which email sources are probably valid senders. If the capability is turned on, it can also learn about valid email by inspecting public folders into which users drag messages they've received. Senders can also be blocked in this way.

In addition to using public folders, MailEssentials provides blacklisting via a selection of third party services. A list is shown in the provider selection window below. Using frequently updated lists helps protect against receiving phishing and other email with malicious intent from reaching user mailboxes.

Use of keywords is also supported for blacklisting incoming mail.

On the other end of the protection spectrum is whitelisting, supported in MailEssentials via IP addresses or domains. Although turned off by default, users can be notified when a "clean" message is received from a source not in the company whitelist.

MailEssentials also supports very basic message archiving, a very small subset of the powerful functionality found in GFI MailArchiver. The screen shot below shows the administrative interface which allows message search and restore capabilities. Unlike MailArchiver, only the administrator has access to archived messages.

Finally, MailEssentials supports multiple user-defined policies. The administrator can prioritize the policies to achieve desired results.