TrendMicro Spam Prevention 

Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service consists of an SMTP pass-through engine and base configuration utilities. It can be deployed as a single server or on multiple servers to provide redundancy. The software (version 1.0) works on port 25, and requires a Windows 2000 Server machine with 512 MB RAM to work efficiently. 

The software can filter all incoming e-mail for multiple e-mail servers. Its GUI is a single multi-tabbed window with a few options. These include changing the settings of General Spam Filter and other Spam Filters which are: Sexual content, Racist content, Commercial offer and another one they call “Make Money Fast”, using sliders that go from low to high (15). The effectiveness of the spam filter depends on the spam engine called PASE that works underneath. This engine can be scheduled to update at fixed intervals besides a forced update. Among other options, you can add blacklists, whitelists and

IPLOCK.

IPLOCK is a good feature as it allows you to lock certain e-mail domains to IP addresses, so for example, you know that e-mails from Citibank come from a range of IP addresses between 1.2.3.0 to 1.2.3.7, so you can lock e-mail from citibank.com to these IP addresses. It’s much easier to spoof an e-mail domain than an IP address, and so when a spammer or virus-maker is sending you messages that seem to be coming from Citibank, then the Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service will block them as they most likely won’t be coming from the valid range of IP addresses you’ve specified earlier. In addition, you can also put size-limit on e-mail messages. 

Once a message is identified as spam, there are two actions the software can take on it: it can tag messages as SPAM, and/or redirect the messages to another e-mail address. 

In our tests, the software tagged about 50% of the spam messages, but as spam keeps changing its attributes and you have to use the latest spam-scan engine (PASE), these results will vary. 

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : Rs 700 per user till 1000 users Key specs : Filters mail based on user’s blacklists/whitelists and with its own spam-scan engine Pros : Can serve filtered e-mail to multiple domains Cons : Is not very transparent to the user Tel : 26592005/993.  E-mail : seema_ansari@trendmicro.com

The software provides reporting. This can be textual or HTML reports; you can get both as well. The reports show statistics of e-mails based on the recipient, the sender, the traffic, domain, hourly and by filters for the domain and the recipient. The documentation explains how the software attaches scores to the mail and how you can read these scores. By way of documentation, there is only one User Guide and online help is not very comprehensive. But you can visit the company’s Web site and get answers to most of your queries there. 

Shruti Pareek