Six items often overlooked when purchasing an email security solution

As discussed in an earlier post, the battle against spam is an ongoing one and requires you to do your due diligence when selecting an email security solution to protect one of your business’ most important assets: email.

When making a purchasing decision, it is easy to get caught up with statistics, and in email security that often means the spam catch rate, as discussed here.  However, all things being equal, there are several more criteria beyond spam catch rate that you need to evaluate:

Here are some of the items that are often overlooked when purchasing a new email security solution, whether in the form of software, appliance or virtual machine.

1. User and Domain Delegation: Does the email security solution allow for flexible settings? Can domain administrators and/or the users themselves control the spam filter aggressiveness to achieve the right balance? Can users take care of their own blacklists and whitelists, and release good or wanted messages from the quarantine? Or is the System Administrator solely responsible for handling all of these issues for every single mailbox, not to mention all the support calls involved?

2. Proprietary technology: Open source means exactly that: open to spammers to get their hands on as well. With proprietary scanning, you can be more confident that your solution is not exposed to the same vulnerabilities.

3. Support: Support may be the last thing you think of when purchasing a solution since you hope not to actually have to use it, but what happens when you do call? Is your call handled by a level 1 customer service rep? Or do you get personalized, direct, expert customer support when you need it, with certified System and Network administrators who solve most issues on the first call?

4. Customization: Can the solution be customized and tweaked to fit your exact requirements and is not simply a ‘one size fits all’ black-box?

5. Not just anti-spam: There are many different threats that enter your organization’s email every day, therefore it is important to have a solution that can counteract spam, phishing, viruses, and every other kind of unauthorized communication. The right emails have to get through to your inbox, and the threats to your email communication must be eliminated.

6. Integration: How well does the solution work with your email servers? Does it integrate with Exchange and Active Directory? Can it do automatic user discovery and verification? It does take time to manually add new employees or remove employees who have left the company.

What other criteria do you look for?