Clearswift Smart Web & Email review

To test the anti-spam functions we forwarded mail from live accounts to the appliance, and after processing each message, it passed them on to our internal mail server. We needed to modify the mail policy route as rather than have spam held in quarantine, we wanted it tagged and released. This was easy to achieve because the flow-chart presentation used for routes makes it simple to see which rules they contain and their order.

We left the mail appliance to its own devices for a week and were impressed with its anti-spam abilities. With our test client running Outlook we created a rule to move all tagged mail to a separate folder, and saw the appliance score a high success rate of over 98% with no false positives.

Web filtering performance was equally impressive with the default content policy blocking access to a wide range of dodgy sites. Social networking sites Facebook and MySpace aren't included in the default settings and to block access to them required a new web policy route for the Personal Web Sites category. This latest release now includes an option to enter a URL and see how it is categorised, making it easier to create custom policies.

Clearswift's Smart Web & Email performs a neat pincer movement on content and messaging security threats. Web filtering and anti-spam performance is particularly good and Clearswift's peer groups make light work of centralising management.

Author: Dave Mitchell