CleanMail Product Reviews And Testimonials

Customers Using CleanMail

Case Studies

Community Health Center in Wyoming

I am the Systems Administrator for a non-profit Community Health Center with 140 employees. We have been looking for an anti-spam product for several months now. We have demoed a few of the top brand-name products out there, but the total-cost-of-ownership was too high for our organization. Most of them wanted $25 to $200 per month plus the initial $2000 for the appliance or software install.

Our old and slow e-mail server gets hit with about 5,000 e-mail messages per day. Only about 300 of them are legitimate -- the rest of them are garbage! All these extra SPAM hits bog down the speed of the e-mail server. Most of them are addressed to employees who are no longer here -- but the server still needs to process them.

Now that I have downloaded and set up No Spam Today! I am really impressed. I installed it on a separate computer from the e-mail server and installed most of the available filters. I was ecstatic to find out that I can use my current workstation-version anti-virus product to scan all attachments without having to purchase anything. Most of the other products that I have seen will charge a heck-of-a-lot MORE for the anti-virus part of the filter than for the spam filter.

I put the SpamAssassin filter fifth down on my list of filters. Having had a little experience with SpamAssassin, I was worried that it would not be effective without a lot of configuration and training. However, because I had the option to put all messages flagged as spam into a special account that I could review, I have looked through the thousands of messages trapped and have not found one false positive! And this was using the default settings with no extra configuration or training done on my part.

It appears to be very light weight in comparison to other products we have tested. It did not require a really fast processor. It runs in the background as a Windows Service.

It took me a little while to learn the interface and learn all the configuration options. It has all the features that I was looking for--specifically:

• Reject connections based on SPF and RBL DNS lookups.
• Trap SPAM messages into a central area where I could review them.
• Do NOT send replies to sender of SPAM messages (See "backscatter")
• A way to get "SPAM signature" updates to more effectively block SPAM.

Not only did No Spam Today! have the above features, it also had these additional features that I really like:

• The "Delay Filter". This is really slick! I put it toward the top of my filters. It might not suit every organization--but it works great for our number of users and e-mails.
• Daily automated report of usage and rejections. Another nice-to-have.
• Make a copy of delivered messages to a folder. Great for trouble-shooting, backup, and (if I sort by size) I can see who is receiving all those large, silly videos.

With the default settings, a couple of SPAM messages did make it through the filter. Part of the reason for this is that I have not started the "training" process. This training process for the Bayesian filter is described on the web-site and is something that I think I can do. This gives me the equivalent of the "SPAM signature" updates without having to pay the monthly cost.

--Matthew Hickok
Systems Administrator
Community Health Center in Wyoming