Review: ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange

Trend Micro offers a product that comes more or less in the middle of the charts throughout this test, doing nothing spectacularly well, but not making any major mistakes either.

The installer is built for scalability: there is no such thing as a local install, only a network install, which can include the local server. A web interface complements the GUI admin nicely.

Our tests showed the product to be relatively slow, taking 59 minutes to queue the mail and a hefty 143 minutes to process it all. And with 6,086 messages unscanned at the end, the product is closer to the bottom of the efficiency table.

The activity log correctly shows all identified viruses, but offers no ability to filter or search the data other than selecting the date range to view. Alerts offer plenty of options, including SNMP, and "outbreak" messages can be sent when thresholds are exceeded, although that only sends another warning message, rather than altering the behavior to adapt to the incident. This seems odd, since the product does offer a facility to block all attachments.

That outbreak warning message may get lost in the clutter anyway: by default, the administrator receives an alert whenever a virus is detected, resulting in a very full admin mailbox indeed, including 20 outbreak alerts.

The web interface provides an ongoing summary of activity, although the numbers fell out of synch during our test, with the display claiming that only 7,137 messages had been scanned, instead of the 10,104 it had really seen. The total of detected viruses (3,914) was correct, however.

For:

Built for scalability, good outbreak controls.

A bit slow, and the activity report is unreliable.

Has potential, but the default configuration doesn't do it any favors