Review: MailMarshal

For: Quick deployment and easy-to-manage email filter at a low cost
Against: Could become expensive for very large organisations
Verdict: A user-friendly appliance that is especially well-suited for small to medium sized enterprises.

The program has many useful predefined policies and an easy-to-use policy engine for creating custom policies. It also features the MailMarshal Today window, which provides a quick summary of recent activity and statistics on topics such as mail and inappropriate content.

We found this product to be quick to install and simple to manage. The installation took just a few minutes with the setup wizard and the filter was pretty much ready to go.

The two interfaces used for management are the MailMarshal Configurator and the MailMarshal Console. Both these interfaces are well organised and easy to navigate, with a clean look and an intuitive navigation tree.

The MailMarshal filter performed well under test. Just by setting a few of the predefined filter policies we were able to stop any harmful email or those that violated policy. Many of the pre-defined policies search the complete body text for possible violations, which makes fooling the filter quite difficult.

Documentation comes in the form of a large PDF user guide that includes both a live table of contents and index. Also provided are many pre-installation or pre-configuration checklists that help immensely in deployment and management.
The user guide also features tables and deployment diagrams for several possible implementations.

Marshal offers phone support globally during business hours in each of the regions and email support for all customers. SpamCensor updates are sent out on a weekly basis, and clients benefit from zero-day threat mechanisms for spam and viruses to deal with major emerging threats immediately. Customers have online access to a technical resource centre.

With prices starting at £550 ($1,343)for a 25-user licence, this product is applicable to organisations of almost any size, but it is particularly good for SMEs. For very large enterprises, however, the product could become pricey

mailmarshalsecuritysmtp