Be All You Can Be, Be A SPAMfighter (12-12-2005)
I recently got excited about a new anti-spam product called SPAMfighter
Why? Because it avoids that key word scanning that every (un)worthy spammer can go around !!!
Before trying it I checked up a bit on it - and according to the white paper, SPAM fighter installs on an exchange server and reports back to the "mother ship" with MD5 encryption and a piece of a mail message. It seems that participating exchange servers help to identify spam and receive the benefit of other mail servers in choosing what to block.
And according to the manufacturer "The original mail message never leaves the server during SEM filtering."
Basically it uses the genius idea of letting everyone "vote" (humans taking intelligent decisions on spam or not spam). That is everyone running the product. Promising idea.
I imaged my exchange server and decided to give it a try...
SPAMfighter Exchange Server Module installed easily onto a 2003 Microsoft Exchange Server.
It uses IIS to administrate and from there it was very simple and intuitive to tweak.
As email arrives and the Exchange Server routes it to its addressees, SEM makes a unique signature for each message and sends it to the SPAMfighter "mother ship" for evaluation. If the SPAMfighter Server determines that a message is spam, it notifies SEM and the spam mail is moved to the users spam folder.
I let it run for a few days and it generated some impressive stats (easily viewable)
I was impressed. Users can check their spam as it is automatically moved to the Spam folder.
Based upon a preliminary analysis, we have a winner in the fight against overflowing mailboxes !!!!
