Cleaning up spam
Except for the senders, no one likes spam. Indeed a recent Gartner Group study found that a third of ISP customers want their service provider to stop the spam flow. Fortunately, you can use antispam server programs to block those nagging messages.
Most mail servers come with some type of built-in spam protection. Although, that functionality sometimes is buried with antiviral protection and can be hard to set up properly.
For ideal spam control, your best bet remains deploying third-party products that work with your hosted e-mail system. Based on our experiences, the spam filter we like most is Brightmail's Solution Suite.
Unlike other antispam programs, Solution Suite is dynamically updated from Brightmail's constantly updated spam databases. That means you can spend your time focused on providing speedier service instead of constantly manually adjusting your spam filters.
Swat those bugs away
Would you want to see a virus crawl into your PC from a message? Of course not, and neither do your users.
Unfortunately, many corporate customers shrug their shoulders at labor hours lost because of a viral infection. That should not continue. The International Computer Security Association says 87 percent of virus infections occur via e-mail attachments, a jump from 56 percent in 1999 and 32 percent in 1998. Because e-mail has widely replaced the floppy disk as a fast way for sharing files, that's hardly surprising.
One thing you can do to try to stop worms and their ilk in their tracks is wean users away from Microsoft Outlook. That may sound like a drastic step, but the arrival of Outlook transmitted diseases like Melissa and ILOVEYOU are cause for concern. Microsoft may beg to differ, but using Outlook for reliable e-mail is like relying on the Titanic for reliable transportation.
Your main job, however, is to make sure that no viruses ever arrive in anyone's mailbox in the first place. To stop viruses at the server levels, the leading products are Trend Micro's InterScan VirusWall and ScanMail and GFi's Mail Essentials for Exchange/SMTP for Exchange and Notes servers.
Small servers for small biz
Suppose you only need to handle mail for a few dozen to a few hundred users? There are products out there made just for you. Sure, you can deploy Sendmail or Post.Office. But there also are easy-to-use Windows NT and Windows 2000 packages for situations where you want to install and forget simple e-mail servers. The ones we've tested and recommend in that category are: Gordano's NTMail and Ipswitch's impressive IMail Server.
