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Winning company: Postini
Winning product: Perimeter Manager Version 3.3
We're not just starting out with anti-spam because it begins with an "A." In 2003, you couldn't escape either the spam messages advertising great mortgage rates (or appealing to prurient interests), or the messages from companies claiming they could stop the spam. For that reason, we pulled anti-spam from the normal "messaging" category and gave it its own rating.
In our first-ever "In the Wild" anti-spam test, we threw more than 10,000 e-mails at 16 enterprise anti-spam products over 30 days to find out which one stopped spam the best (see review). With 16 products tested, we had a lot to love (and hate). So to choose the Best of the Tests Award winner, we decided to go with the best performer in accuracy of stopping spam and preventing false positives. Postini's Perimeter Manager holds that distinction.
In our tests, Perimeter Manager scored the highest in accuracy, catching 94% of the spam in our 10,000 mail messages, and delivered the lowest false-positive rate. It tagged only 0.4% of messages as spam that actually weren't. While Perimeter Manager landed in the middle of the pack on performance, handling about six messages per second, we felt that higher accuracy and lower false positives outweighed performance.
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Postini also showed outstanding control features for fine-tuning the spam engine. End users can log on to the spam management interface to adjust settings as needed. Postini also features spam-fighting technology that we agree with, including per-user whitelist and blacklist settings and per-user quarantines to release false positives. We also were impressed with Postini's batch command language for managing configurations. This is useful for companies that need to update settings on hundreds or thousands of users, or define many different e-mail policies.
However, the bottom line is that Perimeter Manager is just one of a number of good products to wage battle against spam. As we concluded from our tests of these products, the most important way to fight spam is to let your users do it.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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