New Customer - suggestions for server

[mshanley]

Hi Nick,

I am in the process of testing your server product.. I have 20 years in IT and I will probably become a reseller of this as well.

I do have a few suggestions....
1) In Quarantine to help judge effectiveness - See which RBL is blocking email (instead of just RBL) - I'm sure this would be easy I hate diggin through the log file.. it would be much easier to see in quaratine screen

2) Add weights to the RBL list... We could choose how much weight for each RBL 5, 10, 20... and then choose number to discard email Delete / Reject if 30. I think a weighted system is much better than an "Any or Nothing" - reason being is it will cut down on administration. right now alot of email come in from valid sources and because they are on 1 list the email is quarrantined. Mulit-URI is doing this a lot and in fact I might drop them as it is tagging almost everything. This would also have the benefit of not seeing the heavy / definate spam in the quarantine list /email as it would be rejected / blocked and not recoverable.

3) How do we fwd / contribute to spam emails at First Alert?

4) a way to add / automatically whitelist from outbound emails

I have tested quite a few filters over the last 2 years. ASSP is nice but way to complicated. Cleanmail (BytePlanet noSpamToday) is a nice product but they jacked up their prices 3 times.
VamSoft ORF is not bad but does not have a good solutiion to foreign spam and you cannot use all the reg-ex as it blocks some english characters - they need a service like "first Alert" tied in.

I think it works pretty well, If your interested, take a look at some of the other packages and see what you might add to make yours even better! (what are popular features that you might add)

I have been running this for 3 days... so I'll chime back in before the 30 day mark.

Mitch

[nick.bolton]

Thanks Mitch for the suggestions, they're appreciated.

We're in the process of re-doing the user interface as we've run out of room to add more menu items, plus everything could be just nicer

1. Go to System>>Tracking, then move your mouse over the 'Status' column and you'll see why an email was blocked. Not very intuitive but it's there and something we'll improve with the new version.

2. Weighted systems are good, we've switched to that in our consumer version, but unfortunately most consumer types don't understand the concept, so it's been a bit tricky in that respect. But for server admins, it's a good choice.

3. FirstAlert is based on spam honeypot email addresses, so you can't contribute at the moment. We used to let people but so many people submitted legit email it wasn't viable.

4. It's only an incoming filter, but I'll ask the developers if there's a way.

I'll check out the other filters! There's a few other things we're working on - SSL, foreign language filters, more filter options, scalable - 1 database across many installs, individual whitelist/blacklist/filters

Regards
Nick