Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Five spam blockers by the numbers

October 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Five spam blockers by the numbers

TAGS: Friday Five

We've evaluated five anti-spam solutions this year, and for the third year running Symantec (and secret sauce Brightmail) reigns supreme in accuracy. Here's the ranking by percentage of spam blocked in our tests:

Symantec Mail Security, 97% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .199% non-critical false positives
Proofpoint Protection Server, 95% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .215% non-critical false positives
IronPort C-Series, 93% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .058% non-critical false positives
Mirapoint Message Server, 92% accurate, .46% critical false positives, 4.661% non-critical false positives
Microsoft Antigen Spam Manager, 82% accurate, .358% critical false positives, 2.454% non-critical false positives

Symantec, Proofpoint, and IronPort all proved quite accurate, and all three excelled at avoiding false positives. IronPort deserves special mention here, having registered only 1 false positive in nearly 10,000 messages, and this a "non-critical" one. Non-critical false positives are mass mailings that are incorrectly identified as spam, while critical false positives are personal messages that are incorrectly blocked.

Anti-spam gateways have come a long way since 2003, when we first began testing them. It's hard to find a viable commercial solution today that isn't at least 90% accurate, and the best ones exceed 95%. Microsoft Antigen's 82% accuracy is head-scratchingly behind the curve. Click the links to read the full reviews.

Posted by Doug Dineley on October 6, 2006 05:41 PM

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