Review: Spam Titan email security

There are plenty of anti-spam tools available, some software-based and others self-contained hardware appliances.

Spam Titan uniquely bridges this divide and offers a range of additional features that make it a good fit for the small business.

The most notable characteristic of Spam Titan is the way in which it is implemented, as a ready-to-deploy software-based appliance, complete with a custom host operating system (FreeBSD).

Moreover, it can be downloaded and run as either an ISO CD-Rom image for installation on a standalone server/PC, or as a virtual machine for use with VMWare.

Either way, you get to choose and size the hardware yourself, rather than pay for what might be an under- or over-powered platform. There’s very little to install, making Spam Titan quick and easy to evaluate and deploy.

Spam filtering is the raison d’être behind Spam Titan, with the software taking a multi-layered approach to trapping unwanted and offensive advertising, phishing scams and so on.

It employs a large number of tools and techniques to give a high success rate, the vendors also claiming fewer than 0.03 per cent false positives.

It can also filter viruses from incoming and outgoing messages using two anti-virus scanners, ClamAV and Kaspersky Labs, as well as filter content and attachments and append disclaimers to messages.

User management of quarantined messages is another key feature, with users receiving a regular report (Spam Digest) that shows trapped messages with hyperlinks to enable them to be released or deleted, and for senders to be added to the system whitelists. This helps reduce the amount of support required, leaving network administrators time to fine-tune the software using the logging and reporting options.

We downloaded the virtual machine version (180MB zipped) and installed it on a dual-core Windows PC running VMWare Workstation. Spam Titan can also be deployed using the free VMWare Player or Server tools. The whole process took around 10 minutes, the only glitch being a mismatch between the quick-start guide and what we actually had to do to set the server IP addresses.

The appliance is designed to act as a gateway between an in-house mail server and the internet. It can be used with any SMTP server, including Microsoft Exchange, and some firewall forwarding and, possibly, DNS MX record changes will be required.

However, with that done all that was left was to point it at our mail server, configure the domains we wanted to handle (multi-domain support comes as standard), turn on the optional recipient verification feature and set it to work.

The GUI is easy to navigate with a clear dashboard display to start with, showing the current status of the appliance and what it’s been doing. Usefully, most of the options are turned on by default, but there’s still quite a lot that can be modified and tweaked with – for example, facilities to define and apply security policies on a per-domain or per-user basis.

The process is not difficult, but a fair amount of technical expertise is needed to get the best results, which for most small businesses means either swotting up or employing a specialist.

You should also bear in mind that a lot of email servers now come with anti-spam and anti-virus tools as standard, and these may turn out to be a simpler and cheaper alternative, especially for the smaller organisation.

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