Review: MailSite

The installation was relatively painless and firing up the console provided a clutter-free environment. Mailboxes can be set up straight from the Active Directory. The application allowed us to give every user in the directory a mailbox and then it was a matter of setting up the client.

The console offers the option to set up the anti-spam engine via a wizard, which makes light of a range of features including heuristics, pattern matching, signature-based filtering and dictionary attacks.

The server will detect directory harvest attacks and block further email from that source. It is a useful feature but one to keep an eye on as it is open to joe-job abuse.

Outside of the wizards the interface felt somewhat clunky and we felt it could use a bit of attention to bring it up to the current standard in the market.

A junk-mail folder manages quarantines and the server offers IMAP and webmail interfaces, as well as mail routing and relaying. Strangely, our IMAP client did not show the junk mail folder though it worked perfectly through the web interface.

Mail filtering ran quickly until we turned on the heuristic checking, which made the test server process mail extremely slowly.

Also, while the heuristics were effective at catching spam, they did trigger a large number of false positives. A lot of tuning may be required to avoid causing problems for enterprises.

The product needs an efficiency check for its heuristics and an interface refresh before we would feel comfortable recommending it as an anti-spam solution.

However, its other email server facilities are very strong so it is a sound investment, even if you keep another anti-spam solution in place for now.

For:

Strong mail server platform.

Heuristic performance was poor.

It is a great mail product but it still has to find its anti-spam feet.