When the Middle Man Works

摘要

Many antispam-appllance vendors put all their eggs in one basket, relying solely on the SpamAssassin tool for spam identification, custom interfaces, reporting and additional management capabilities. Not BlueCat Networks. Its Meridius Security Gateway Appliance 3.0 supplements SpamAssassin's standard heuristics, Bayesian filtering, spoof tests and canned blacklists with a proactive, eight-level detection scheme. BlueCat says that version 3.0, due out early next month, yields industry-leading catch rates. To test this, I installed a prerelease version on the edge of my school's production network as an e-mail gateway. Although I didn't get a chance to test all the new features (some weren't ready), I found that the new version offers dramatically improved antivirus capabilities and a broader strategy for spam blocking compared with version 2.1, which I had running at the school over the summer. This comprehensive, albeit pricey, solution is a breeze to set up and even easier to administer.