Several years ago, we were scouting out anti-spam solutions and ended up selecting FrontBridge Technologies to help reign in the spamathon. The attraction to FrontBridge was that they had the lowest false positive rate in the industry. Since our firm has a heavy practice in labor and employment law with plenty of defense work for management in sexual harassment cases, it is not uncommon for sexually explicit references to appear in emails to and from the client. The last thing we wanted was to have legitimate emails blocked - even at the risk of having more spam make it through the filter.
Since then, FrontBridge added an anti-virus component - using three engines to search all inbound and outbound mail. The interface provides administrators with the ability to block certain attachments, limit the size of messages, block email from certain addresses and does it all before the messages get anywhere near our network. We host our own Exchange Server in house - but everything comes and goes through FrontBridge. Thus, we could open port 25 on our firewall ONLY for the IP addresses of FrontBridge's servers - rather than being open to the whole world.
FrontBridge then began offering what it dubbed as "Active Message Continuity" - which is basically a 30 day rolling archive of all email you have sent or received (external as well as internal). If our in house Exchange Server goes down, users simply log in to what amounts to an Outlook Web Access interface hosted by FrontBridge.
We thought this technology was impressively cool - and so did Microsoft - who bought FrontBridge not too long ago and added even more features - such as the ability for individual users to restore their own emails, the ability for administrators to "declare an outage" in order to test the reliability of the disaster recovery solution, and the ability to generate reports on everything from top spam recipients to detailed reports of all emails sent and received by any user.
A disaster recovery solution that doubles as an anti-spam and anti-virus blocker? A solution that can work as web mail without opening your network to unnecessary vulnerabilities? What's not to like?
Our only complaint? It would be nice if there was an integrated Blackberry Enterprise Server tied in with Active Message Continuity.
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