August 12, 2003

Antispam services: Analyze their focus, expertise, and breadth of view
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As you look for candidate services, price is certainly one consideration, but it is important to examine carefully the following:

Spam logic
How closely does the service track changes in spammer behavior? How often does it re-examine the rules used to trap spam? Is its total antispam strategy sound and comprehensive but not intrusive to the business? Is it moving at the speed of evolution of the spam game?

Boundary protection
Spam is not the only problem. How well is the enterprise boundary protected against malicious behaviors coming in from the Internet—denial-of-service attacks, directory-harvesting attacks, and more.

Customer input
How does the service work with the enterprise to ensure that the rules are doing the right thing for this business? For this department? Can the enterprise make modifications to the logic where needed to accommodate the activities in a particular department?

Reports
What kinds of reports will be generated by the service? How will the enterprise know what action has been taken? How will it know the number of messages processed, and the number identified as spam? How granular is the report? Does it note the reasons messages were considered to be spam? The types of spam? Is this the right level of information for the enterprise?

Service level
What is the service-level agreement to which the service is willing to commit? If something goes wrong at the service, what provision has it made for business continuity? What is the worst thing that could happen? What is the level of risk that the enterprise message traffic might be stopped by events at the service? What escalation and recourse would the enterprise have?

Security
What are the hiring practices at this service provider? Does it do background checking on its employees? How sure are you that it is taking care of the enterprise messages as you desire, and not exploiting the trust you are placing in it?

Configuration
Some of the services can configure the message path such that the actual examination of the messages takes place on the enterprise premises, while they download rules to the processing point.

In January 2003, the leading services are Postini, MessageLabs, FrontBridge, and Syntegra. EDoxs resells Brightmail in smaller quantities for small and midsize businesses, adding custom content filtering and image detection. Other competent services include MailWise and MX Logic. MailWise is particularly adept at Novell networks. Sprint is reselling Big Fish. MX Logic was founded in 2002 by the team that built USA.net.

Gartner originally published this article on December 30, 2002.

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