Plesk SpamAssassin or 4PSA Spam Guardian?

[spaceout]

I've been using 4PSA's Spam Guardian product for just over a year now and I've been considering swithing to the Plesk version. I would love any opinions/experience as to which product may work better. I realize that both products use the same basic engine, but I'm not sure if there could be any differences that could cause one to "out-perform" the other.

I can't say that I've been completely thrilled with the performance of the 4PSA product. I thought the idea is that over time it will "catch" and filter more and more spam so less will get through. This doesn't really appear to be happening. I currently have approx. 123,000 messages used for spam training. My server processes on average 2700 emails a day and drops about 531 as spam.

My personal email account brings in about 130 to 150 spam messages a day and 4PSA's Spam Guardian catches maybe 30 to 40 of them. Is this as good as it gets after a full years worth of training?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Have you kept SpamGuardian up to date with the newer releases? What I have done is to also manually add some additional RulesDuJour rule sets to their configuration to make it more effective. (on 7.5.3 servers)

I personally have not paid Plesk for their SA license, since earlier versions of theirs were a bit limited... and seeing all the current set of problems with the 7.5.4 release, I would hate to pay more money just to find that it's more limited or not.

 

[spaceout]

Upgrades...

Yes, I have kept up-to-date with the latest releases. When I upgraded last (or maybe two times ago) I also added the RulesDuJour option but I couldn't really tell any difference? If anything, it seems like it got worse after the last upgrade.

My annual "subscription" for their products have expired and I need the updated version of the 4PSA product in order to upgrade Plesk to 7.5.4...so I'm just wondering if I should bother to pay for the 4PSA upgrade again or just use the Plesk product (which I already have a license for) instead.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

or just use the Plesk product (which I already have a license for) instead

Well, if you have already paid the extra for the Plesk SA key, then certainly give it a try and see if it works better for you. I have no idea why your SpamGuardian would have gotten less effective after an update.

Mine have always been quite effective, especially for those clients who insist on getting their email addresses listed on every spam list possible. I have one client who receives over 2500 spam hits per day, but only about 15-20 per day reach his mailbox, which I consider to be pretty good.

 

[spaceout]

...

Hmm...I don't understand why mine isn't working that well. Where is the "sensitivity" level set on that account? I've moved mine from Strict to Very Strict and tried many different settings, but it doesn't seem to make a big difference.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

For his account I had tried "Very Strict" but he was having too many false positives. He's currently back at "Moderate" and forward to his mailbox (due to false positives) and I set his Outlook up to auto-move Spam marked messages for his review. He is in a business where he gets emails from new clients and prospects everyday, not like many who's address book stays fairly static. He now knows to review and forward to either SPAM or HAM email addresses to assist in the training process. Maybe it's because of the sheer volume of emails he gets each day?

Did you set up the Training email address and then train your clients to forward undetected Spam mails to that email address?

And there was a jump in detection when I added more of the RulesDuJour sets, but that does take some admin monitoring since they deprecate some of the sets and whatnot.

As I said earlier, if you already paid Plesk for their SA key, why not give that a try and see if you have better luck with that one? If you have Plesk 7.5.4 I hear they made some changes, I just don't know (yet) exactly what, or if that info I heard was just poop.

 

[hardweb]

spaceout, if you learn so many emails and the detection is the one you tell above, than there is something wrong on the server. On my own server I trained less than 10000 emails and the detection rate is higher than 95%. Open a support ticket with our support.

 

[justyxxxx]

spaceout - I agree with you. I purchased the 4PSA Spam Guardian recently (I had the Plesk Spam Filter) and mainly liked the idea of having the ham_learn and spam_learn folder is the reason why I moved.

After three weeks and literally hundreds of thousands of emails sent to the junk_learn folder, I can say that the 4PSA Spam Filter is awful when compared to the Plesk spam filter.

I have enjoyed most all other 4PSA products, but their spam filter leaves much to be desired. I do plan to switch back next week if 4PSA doesn't come up with a way to make it work better. My customers have not been happy at all, and I certainly haven't been happy at all. I have also talked with support and, so far, the problem still exists.

 

[sieb@]

For our high volume email customers, I have implemented multiple Fortress Secure Mail Gateways to filter out spam, and with an almost 99% success rate. I highly recommend them.

Unfortunetly, they just changed their website this month and no longer offer the stand alone FSMG installations, only Mailscanner alone. But, you can still download it from here: http://dl.fsl.com/download.php?version=1.65&pw=f3f0623d (This is meant to be installed on its own server and sit infront of your hosting servers).

 

[jamesyeeoc]

FSMG sounds similar to ART's Project Gamera (PG). PG also does AV as well as AntiSpam.

 

[sieb@]

FSMG has a full web frontend to manage all of its settings including Anti-virius. It also uses Mailwatch to give you all sorts of stats about the spam/virii that its filtered out. It will also do Milter-ahead so it will filter out mail that is addressed to fake users, if they dont exist on your server, it drops the message.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Originally posted by sieb
But, you can still download it from here: http://dl.fsl.com/download.php?version=1.65&pw=f3f0623d

I guess they removed it, I get a 404 File not found

 

[justyxxxx]

James - I am stil able to download it at the above location.

Also - 4PSA says that they know the problem and so hopefully they can fix it - I'd much rather stick with their solution since it has the ham/junk learning features via IMAP.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

justyxxxx - I've tried clicking on that link from multiple PC's on different ISP's, turned off firewalls, no matter what I do I get the 404

I'm either having a 'stupid' day or something...

 

[justyxxxx]

Basically - what it does for me is redirects me to the location for the link and then brings up the file to download. I'm using Internet Explorer with Windows XP.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Still no luck on this. Have tried IE5, IE6, Firefox, Mozilla on multiple Windows and Linux boxes, from different geographical locations in California (different ISPs and DNS servers), tried clearing browser caches, no proxies, everything I can think of. And all it ever gives me is 404 file not found. Oh well.

 

[justyxxxx]

hey - now it's giving me the 404 error - so perhaps they changed dns entries or something and it took a while longer for the change to hit me . . .

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Just my luck to miss being able to download it to test... always a day late and a dollar short!

 

[justyxxxx]

don't worry - I never actually completed the download either - and to top it off, I backed into a light pole tonight. So, my luck is similar . . .

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Off Topic

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I don't know which is worse, being the driver and hitting something, or having your parked car get totalled by a hit and run truck driver (happened 2 weeks ago), and being at home with 7 people in the house, and none of us heard or saw a thing when it happened. Car was parked directly outside in front of the house...
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