Exchange 2010 anti-spam filtering vs. advanced email gateways

The Exchange 2010 Edge Transport offers some advanced antispam technologies (compared to the former versions) in order to help businesses achieve better protection against  threats coming to your inbox. Here's a short list with all these algorithms and technologies. However, when considering ONLY Exchange 2010 protection, you should bare in mind what other protection characteristics you need and how long are you willing to invest (from your time) to monitor Exchange 2010 filters.

   1. Content Filtering
      Content filtering uses an algorithm to identify spam. While this is automatic, this method also lets you add words to a Custom Words list, so you can either add words that should always cause an email to register as spam, or words that should indicate a mail is not spam. 

   2. IP Whitelisting 
      This allows you to whitelist ip.addrs that should always be allowed to deliver email with no further filtering. 

   3. IP DNS Whitelisting
      This setting allows adding  one or more lists of providers that indicate safe servers, which will not send spam. This requires you to identify and trust a third party service.

   4. IP Blocklisting
      This is just what is sounds like, a list of systems banned from sending you email.

   5. Blocklisting Providers
      This is another setting that allows you to add service providers who maintain and publish lists of known spammer ip.addrs. 

   6. Recipient Filtering
      This gives you two options; to block messages sent to non-existent recipients, and to block messages sent to specific recipients. 

   7. Sender Filtering
      Here, you can specify senders that you want to block by email address or domain, and you can also block messages that don’t have sender information, as seen in the MAIL FROM: SMTP message. 

   8. Sender ID
      If a message comes from a system not in the SPF record, you can set the system to reject or delete it. This does require that the SPF record be set to a hard fail (-).

   9. Sender Reputation
      Sender reputation is the only option that has its own behavior that includes some temporary actions for senders of spam. The protocol exchanges are analysed to see if they are suspect, a reverse DNS query is performed, and it can also test the sending address by probing it to see if it is an open proxy, and therefore subject to abuse.

Exchange 2010 offers some great anti-spam and anti-phishing mechanisms included. It also offers a version that includes the best antivirus products on the market.  However, considering that your time is limited and yet you need some advanced anti-spam features included:

1. Header checking
2. Attachment extracting
3. Advanced Bayesian anti-spam algorithms
4. Multi language anti-spam engine
5. New Senders Sorting, List server
6. Management of notifications, alerts, log reporting
7. Minimum installing and configuring time

Taking all these into account,you should consider trying and purchasing an advanced email gateway for your company. Try Visendo Mail Checker Server and tell us your oppinion.