MailMarshal 3.2 for Windows NT

Once I got the serial number, things improved a little. It was very nice to see as much support for Lotus Notes as for Microsoft Exchange, and direct support for Notes 5, which is famously different in wide-area mail routing from previous versions. However, it would be unwise to trial a system like this on a live mail feed with high volumes of data shooting through all the time, so I can't readily advise on rates of speed, or proof against load-related crashes.

However, the integrated POP3 server (for companies with 'just Outlook' running) is a plus, and the facilities for appending automatic disclaimer signatures are slick and well thought out. The reporting package, while cumbersome, due to the reliance on SQL 7, is exhaustive, allowing mail admins to produce 'billing' data, assuming that a charging basis for email use by volume has been dreamed up. There's a typically coy series of dialogs that permit the construction of 'censor scripts' - combinations of words to look for in mail, which should trigger an alarm or prevent unsolicited bulk emails from turning up in naive users' inboxes. Only in one dialog screen-snap can you just discern 'kid and drug near sex or SEX' as an example. To my mind, it's a bit mean to open this Pandora's box of issues for the mail administrator without rather more in the way of pre-built example filters. Staying ahead of bulk-mailers, and thinking up possible search strategies for trapping morally dubious or commercially sensitive content, isn't a trivial task.

MailMarshal is a heavyweight product, with heavyweight requirements for operation. It's a worthy competitor for the MIMEsweeper market share and it certainly does better than the offering I reviewed recently, which scanned attachments for viruses only after you hacked the Registry on the server. Be in no doubt, however, this is a serious tool that won't slip into place easily in an afternoon's fiddling about.

Author: Steve Cassidy