Because of the load it can put on systems and your networks, the larger the company the less value in running it yourself.

Between 2004 and 2010 I spent a lot of time working with on-premise solutions which processed hundreds of thousands of clean mail each day and deflected many orders more spam.

During that time I had to understand a lot about where spam and associated malware comes from and what techniques work well against it.

By 2010 the kind of effort required to keep up with the above was something I particularly found resource intensive, even though much of it I was delegating to my team.

So around that time, I decided it just wasnt worth it and outsourced mail scanning to the cloud and never looked back.

GFI got in touch with me about a month ago and asked me to give their new product, GFI MailEssentials Online a spin and share my thoughts.

Ive witnessed customers who have used their provider for years struggle to find basic settings through no fault of their own the systems can be a right mess.

If youve ever had to work with policy rules or setup directory synchronization in FOPE, for example, youll see that this is a breath of fresh air.

We know that for the SMB market, GFI have over a decade of experience with the on-premise MailEssentials product so we know its going to be capable, but I wasnt expecting to see the option to use features like greylisting, which I think is particulary effective in the fight against spam.

Like most other solutions, a dashboard greets the admin with statistics shown for areas such as spam volume.

I was asked for the domain name, and the primary mail server to list perfect for the SMB market.

This can at a high-level be compared to the built-in anti-spam features within Exchange, where blocking, quarantine levels can be specified based on score.

Youll also see configuration options for dealing with unknown users, and the ability to switch on or off the greylisting features.

GFI call this Whitelisting, though personally I prefer the term Safe Senders as used within the Outlook client.

From, To, Subject and mail server IP addresses can be specified here.

Many forms of attachment are blocked, some to ensure that end-users cannot bypass web filtering to get access to executable files, and more commonly to ensure that malware is very unlikely to reach internal recipients.

Therefore blocking executables (or exes renamed to a different file extension) from being received in the first place is extremely helpful.

First of all, theres the ability to block unknown email addresses at the edge and prevent any attempt to deliver them to your local Exchange server.

Secondly is if you wish to be able to give end-user access to the spam quarantine and release messages themselves.

However the downside is that the on-premises sync tool often requires some maintenance and occasional troubleshooting.

Another thing I did check was that it could handle more than just mailboxes for example in my example organization, Ive got mailboxes hosted on Office 365 and it imported these also without any issue.

Being able to demonstrate that a product is working is very important when the time comes to prove that its been a valuable investment.

Keygen Gfi Mailessentials 2012