Spam

I Hate Spam Server Edition: Is It Worth the Effort?

In the new technology enabled economy we have learned to leverage new tools to turn a profit. Unfortunately, marketers have abused our e-mail inboxes. Unsolicited commercial email, or SPAM, has been out of control for many people in the last few years. This kind of advertising is cheap for a marketer, but it can be very costly to a business. SPAM can invite network slowdowns, lost productivity, and opportunity for computer virus infections. One possible solution to this problem is installing a SPAM filter. There are many products available today. I will evaluate I Hate SPAM Server Edition (IHSSE) created by Sunbelt Software based on available documentation, price, ease of installation, filter effectiveness, administration requirements, ease of updating the software, and tech support.

When I was initially researching IHSSE I found their website to be very helpful. After reading the website I was interested in running a demo of the software. Before installing it on our email server I wanted to know as much as possible about the product. Sunbelt Software conveniently provided an online user manual and a knowledge base on their website. The user manual allowed me to get an idea of the install procedure. After reading over the install procedure I took a look at the knowledge base to see what other common problems were possible. Having access to all of these documented resources made me feel very comfortable with their product before I installed it.

Obviously, in every company no matter how good a product is the price has to be reasonable or it is a showstopper. Before I installed IHSSE I wanted to make sure that the price was in the ballpark of what I was looking for. I submitted a quote request by filling out a form on their website. The quote was returned to me within 24 hours. The price was initially high but the salesman was willing to negotiate. We settled on a price that was slightly over 50% of the original asking price. I felt a little insulted by such a high initial price but overall Sunbelt Software did offer a fair price.

I downloaded the software and looked over the prerequisites for the installation. There were only two updates that needed to be done in order to install. These updates were very common and easily installed. Although the install was successful on the first try I did have to take the email server down twice. The server was rebooted once after installing the updates and once after the installation of IHSSE. After the second reboot I did have some difficulty getting the SNMP services running again. After getting SNMP service back up there were no more problems.

When I opened the administration console for IHSSE it appeared to be user friendly. I added a test group of users to the filtering policy and began to test it. During the 30 day trial period I stayed in close contact with the test group. The filter was catching approximately 96% of all SPAM messages but it did seem to have approximately 7% false positives. I did improve these numbers later after tweaking the filter settings. The filtering capabilities offer custom filter policies and user-by-user assignment. I found the interface for administering user assignments to be cumbersome and tedious because it would not allow groups to be used. In a large organization this may be a difficult situation to handle.

After receiving feedback from the test group I started tweaking the filter. While administration of IHSSE is pretty straightforward it is almost a daily task in the first few months.