Sophos MailMonitor for Exchange
The configuration and administraton is handled from within the one Sophos console, making it easy for the administrator to control. The automatic updates can be scheduled basically from anything down to once every hour; there is also the option to run manually for those paranoid administrators out there.
Interestingly while on that topic, something we had never really given thought to before is that the scheduling is once every hour, but not necessarily on the hour. If everyone polled for updates exactly on the hour, the load on the Sophos update servers would be enormous. To get around this, Sophos injects a randomisation that allows the downloads to be staggered, which saves their servers and bandwidth and evens out the stresses on them.
Sophos has obviously put a lot of research and effort into this application and then made a very user friendly interface packed with features particularly for the administrator to monitor the status of the system and set the custom parameters for that particular environment.
| Product | MailMonitor for Exchange 1.7.1 |
| Price | AU$34.65 per user for 100-199 users; $29.26 per user for 200-499 users |
| Vendor | Sophos |
| Phone | 02 9409 9100 |
| Web | www.sophos.com.au |
| Interoperability |  |
| Suports Exchange 2000 & 2003. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| One integrated engine. | |
| ROI |  |
| Average price and definitions included for 12 months. | |
| Service |  |
| Included for duration of subscription. | |
| Rating |  |
Unfortunately mailmarshal's reporting of problems to the sender leaves a lot to be desired. It's reports are amongst the least useful of any mail gateway software on the market, failing to include the headers of the original message, and typically misidentifying or not identifying the sender and recipients.
As someone who sees a lot of bounces from mailing list traffic, I'm sick of not knowing which addresses are supposed to be removed from the list.