Spam. I have to say that it used to drive me crazy since I received over 150 per day and all of my spam tools did a mediocre hob at handling the situation. It used to that is until I recently started using MX Logic for my spam filtering. I liked it so much that we are now a MX Logic partner and have rolled the system out to several of our clients.
So why do I like it compared to other systems?
We used to have a locally installed spam filtering program on our server which did an OK job. It filtered the spam and put anything that it found to be a spam item in to a folder in Outlook called Spam. Outlook also has a built-in Junk Mail Filter which helps, but it still not optimal by any means. I found myself needing to check my Spam and Junk Mail folders throughout the day and deleting the spam while moving the false positives to my Inbox. It nearly drove me to toss my laptop out the window by the end of the day (OK, that and Vista but that is another story…).
I went from getting about 150 or more spam messages a day to only 2 in the last month. I turned off my Outlook Junk E-mail functionality since there was nothing for it to do. In the past month I have only gotten 4 false positives and have had to delete a dozen or so spam messages from the quarantine web page. I used to manage my spam every day throughout the day and now it is not even on my radar. I am one happy camper now when it comes to spam or should I say not come to spam.
How MX Logic works
For the technology side, it is a very easy and straightforward process to set this up. First you need to sign up for the MX Logic services you need and then a day or two later, that side is ready to be configured. Leaving the default filter options work fine. The default is to deny all highly suspect spam (this means a message that has a 99.999% chance of being spam) and the rest end up in the users quarantine folder. Just add the email addresses for all of the users and you are done. Once the MX Logic side is ready to go, it is a simple process of changing your Internet MX record to point to the MX Logic servers. There is no real downtime since the Internet will send email directly to your own server until it gets updated and then send it through MX Logic. The people sending you email will not notice any change at all during or after the process.
For the end user, they do not need to do anything in particular except review the daily email they receive that lists all of the spam emails that got caught in the quarantine. This is usually a fairly small list since the majority of the spam has already been denied. If there is a false positive in the quarantine, just click the message and choose an option on the web page that comes up for Always Allow and it will never be caught again. If you get a spam message in your Inbox, you can download a one click Outlook add-on which allows you to highlight the message and delete it using that new button and it will send a message to MX Logic to add that message to their spam filter. The user will now enjoy a nearly spam free existence.
The good about MX Logic
- It just plan works great – the engine captures nearly all spam emails while not blocking and real messages. No system is perfect, but this one comes really close.
- It is a hosted solution – This means that the spam email never make to your server saving you critical Internet bandwidth and server resources.
- It is inexpensive – For only $35 per month you can get a 20 user setup that takes care of your basic spam and virus filtering needs. The pricing gets less expensive the more users you add.
- Options – You can setup a plan for just basic spam/virus filtering or get as complex as email archiving, outgoing filtering, compliance and regulation needs, and DR capabilities (if you server is down users can login and do email real time via a web page and it all syncs back up when your server goes back online) to name a few.
For perspective, we have one client that gets nearly 30,000 spam messages a day every day. Not that they have MX Logic in place, none of this traffic is hitting their server or using up their Internet connection. Needless to say, they are much happier now. The funny thing is that after rolling it out to several clients we had users from all of them contact the Helpdesk to say that the system was not working because some newsletters were not getting caught by the spam engine and now showing up in their Inbox. Seems silly, but most people are so used to spam engines that catch false positives that this was the norm.
We signed up to be a MX Logic partner because the system works really well and it was very cost affective for our clients. We end up only making pennies when we sign someone up, but we never align with a partner for the financial transaction. We do this to give our clients the best available option in the market while also getting them the best possible price.
If Spam is driving you or your company crazy like it did mine and many of our other clients, you should check out MX Logic http://www.mxlogic.com/.
