trimMail

TrimMail is an email gateway appliance housed in a neat desktop case with an external power supply built into its power cable. It is an SMTP relay that focuses primarily on identifying spam. Installation is straightforward with the web-browser management interface, and the menus are intuitive. You can combat possible denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that randomly generate user addresses at your domain by listing legal users and trimMail will reject all other messages. Basic content-control features can block attachments by file type or name (and rename them if you wish to prevent them from being executed easily), and dangerous html scripts can be disabled. Anti-spam is based on statistical scoring including Bayesian statistical analysis, public realtime blackhole lists (RBLs), lexical analysis, reverse IP lookup, anti-virus, and white/blacklists. The scoring threshold, above which a message is regarded as spam, is adjustable by the administrator if you get too many false positives or too much spam goes undetected. You can delete spam or let it through and tag it, but there is no quarantine facility - you must rely on your existing email server (or filters at client level) to sort and quarantine spam, based on the tags trimMail has attached to the mail header and the subject heading. One advantage of filtering out spam at the client is that the user can manage his own quarantine area, relieving the administrator of that task and making false positive release more efficient. Detection of a virus adds to the spam scoring, and therefore a virus sent to you by someone on your whitelist will still get through. You need to deploy an additional anti-virus product. Updating can be carried out manually, or it will be done automatically each week. We would like to see an option to schedule updates for the anti-virus and anti-spam databases more frequently (which the vendors have promised to sort out). Management and configuration may be done remotely via a web-browser interface but there is no time-out once you are logged on to the unit. Neither is there any way of logging off except by closing the browser window.