Spam annoyance (corporate)

Author
Discussion

Famous Graham

Original Poster:

26,553 posts

227 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
Over the last month or so our spam has increased a fair amount (spam getting through, I mean).

It tends to be more the older employees (as in been here longer) so I'm hoping that points to it being external, rather than someone internal having a trojan, as their addresses will have been in the wild for longer. I've had a look at two of the most "afflicted" recipients' machines and can't find anything dodgy. However, most of the spam is appearing to come from the recipient's email address, which is what got me thinking trojan in the first place. Any thoughts on that?

We're currently using Sophos for our AV, with PureMessage bolt on for spam blocking, but it seems to be losing the battle.

Anyone got any recommendations for SME size solutions, products, suggestions that can be deployed alongside SBS 2003 + XP? I'd prefer server level, simply for ease of deployment, or if it does have to be desktop level, something with an MSI so I can roll it out via GPO.

Cheers

LordGrover

33,556 posts

214 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
GFI mail essentials - it rocks. click

Allanv

3,540 posts

188 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/

I just set this up for a client and it is working exteemly well for him. He used to have GFI but it never seemed to work for him.

spandexx

944 posts

278 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
Allanv said:
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/

I just set this up for a client and it is working exteemly well for him. He used to have GFI but it never seemed to work for him.
Yup, Messagelabs is used on 30 of our sites and works a treat. Mention Delta Comtech Ltd when you order and we get a few beer tokens.

Big_Dan

485 posts

254 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
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Another vote for MessageLabs, ainless and means the spam messages don't even get anywhere near your network. I found the antivirus to be excellent too.

K50 DEL

9,266 posts

230 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
As an alternative to message labs, I used to use Trend WAN Wide and very little got through, it's not the easiest of things to set up, but it's very effective.
Also requires zero desktop administration, controlled completely from server / console

Allanv

3,540 posts

188 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
spandexx said:
Allanv said:
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/

I just set this up for a client and it is working exteemly well for him. He used to have GFI but it never seemed to work for him.
Yup, Messagelabs is used on 30 of our sites and works a treat. Mention Delta Comtech Ltd when you order and we get a few beer tokens.
Oh no you dont I saw him first the beer tokens are mine.....

Famous Graham

Original Poster:

26,553 posts

227 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
rofl

Cheers guys

I'm trying out GFI at the moment (simply because it was the first suggestion).

I'll see how it goes

gamefreaks

1,976 posts

189 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
The spam is made to appear to come from the recipent because it gets around some stupid and misconfigured spam filters by tricking them into thinking it is internal mail.

Copy and paste the headers into here to see the path it has taken: http://www.levinecentral.com/mail_parse/default.as...

If you fancy going it alone and not using a hosted solution, then have a look at MailScanner: http://www.mailscanner.info/ You really need to know Linux and SMTP servers to make it work though, but once it is up and running, it works very well.

HellDiver

5,708 posts

184 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
http://www.cloudmark.com/en/home.html

I use the home version, which is a peer-to-peer type affair (it communicates back to Cloudmark which emails you block/unblock on a trust system). I believe the corporate system uses the same database. Hit rate is very good, a I rarely have to manually block spam, and false hits are almost never a problem.

LordGrover

33,556 posts

214 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
Allanv said:
He used to have GFI but it never seemed to work for him.
I know where you're coming from. I bit the bullet and paid for someone familiar with it to configure it properly for us - well worth it. It traps pretty much everything with very few false positives - if it considers anything suspect it delivers it to our Junk E-mail folders but they are few and far between.
The downside is it's another app to run on a server and the email does get downloaded before checking - I assume the online services mentioned do all the checking before it gets that far?
Once the license expires maybe I'll have a look at one of the online alternatives...

roadsweeper

3,786 posts

276 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
I'd recommend the SonicWALL email security appliance range - it gives you fantastic control and is extremely effective.

Disclaimer: We are a SonicWALL reseller.

We could probably route you through our own filtering solution too - we have two layers of anti-virus and anti-spam before our email server (which hosts many domains and accounts for our clients) and it's brilliantly effective.

paddyhasneeds

51,939 posts

212 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
Cloudmark.

The accuracy rate is frightening quite frankly, we've used it for about 9 months and I dread to think how much crap would be in peoples inboxes without it.

It's behind an smtp gateway which is home-brew running Postfix and MailScanner which refuses an unholy amount of mail as well.

Allanv

3,540 posts

188 months

Tuesday 23rd June 2009
quotequote all
LordGrover said:
Allanv said:
He used to have GFI but it never seemed to work for him.
I know where you're coming from. I bit the bullet and paid for someone familiar with it to configure it properly for us - well worth it. It traps pretty much everything with very few false positives - if it considers anything suspect it delivers it to our Junk E-mail folders but they are few and far between.
The downside is it's another app to run on a server and the email does get downloaded before checking - I assume the online services mentioned do all the checking before it gets that far?
Once the license expires maybe I'll have a look at one of the online alternatives...
Yes messagelabs checks it for spam and viruses before it reaches the exchange server. I have tried a few different ones before, GFI for example but messagelabs does all the work before the email arrives.

I have used it in SME's to 10 unit offices to corporate big names and it just works, but saying that GFI is the top of the list for installed software in spam control.

erolb

506 posts

189 months

Wednesday 24th June 2009
quotequote all
I work for a large US conglomerate and we have had the same. We use Google as out mail scrubber - They state that it's one of the biggest bot net attacks they have seen. They said they check each mail for 2000 known traits and this mails from this latest spam attack negotiates them all. They have written some filters for us and it seems to have worked.

tamore

7,070 posts

286 months

Wednesday 24th June 2009
quotequote all
www.spamstore.co.uk seem pretty good. we've been using them for about a month now.