In the never-ending battle against spam, my company’s looking at McAfee Secure Messaging service. Do any of our resident IT types have experience with this? Is it worth the money? I’ll be asking around in a couple of other places. If you want to reply confidentially, my e-mail address is in my profile.
Thanks!
I don’t even know what it is, but I’m going to recommend against it. McAfee software is generally intrusive, buggy and resource-hungry. I don’t see why this would be an exception.
If it’s just spam that’s the problem, there are solutions that are free and probably better.
How big is your company and your IT staff? This might be OK for a small company with limited IT support.
This thing comes in two flavors - one is an externally hosted application, where McAfee essentially becomes your ISP for email. Your company’s inbound email goes to the servers at McAfee, filtered and sent down the line to your in-house email servers. The other flavor is a dedicated hardware appliance that lives inside your network.
If you’re already using McAfee anti-virus in the company, I’d advise against the thing as it’s not a good idea to use the same antivirus application and definitions on all parts of a network - if you’re an all McAfee shop, for example, and a new virus comes out that McAfee doesn’t have a signature out for yet, you’re screwed.
If you do something like Trend Micro on the gateways, Symantec on the email servers and AVG on desktops, you’ve got three chances instead of just one that one of those manufacturers has released a signature for the new virus.
We’re a small bulk-mail company with less than 25 people who have company e-mail addresses and a 3-person IT staff. Our e-mail is actually hosted by an outside company, so we don’t have an in-house e-mail server. We were looking at the externally hosted version, but so far I haven’t heard anything in favor of it. Instead, a few people in our industry have recommended Postini (www.postini.com) with other recommendations for Barracuda Networks (http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en) and Spam Stops Here (http://spamstopshere.com).
I’ll continue to monitor this thread, and I do appreciate the help so far. Mangetout, it’s always a pleasure seeing you.
As I may have mentioned a few months ago, what I need is something which runs almost completely invisibly with few false positives. The people who get the most spam aren’t very computer-savvy, yet they’re the ones who deal with our customers, so they’re the most dependent on e-mail. Our customers also routinely e-mail us attachments, often large ones so we can’t be as strict as some firms when it comes to limiting attachments.