Looking to move away from sophos puremessage

[KK20]

After having a very bad time with sophos support we are looking to move away from sophos. We have an on premises exchange 2016 server and we use a pfsense with snort firewall. Im not necessarily looking for a UTM as the cost tends to increase somewhat.

 

I am looking for either a combined AV/antispam solution (that would remove sophose enterprise managed clients completely) or an antispam solution (just for the exchange server). Ideally I would like an inbound and outbound (thinking to combat compromised accounts). Currently we simply tarpit and throttle/ratelimit student accounts via exchange. We have no plans to move to office 365 and will retain on premises for some time to come. we are not a large volume site and have approximately 800 mailboxes for 500 users (old users legitimately retained, email enabled service accounts, make up the extra)

 

Any ideas from you good folk?

[TechMonkey]

Windows Defender does a fab job here. If you haven't got SCCM you are a bit more limited to what reports you get and you have to use GPOs or scripting to set it up. Depending on how much you would be saving by dropping Sophos, you could get Office 365 ATP to help with spam and phishing. I am looking into ATP for next year. Currently we use Vipre, which is very good but I want to streamline.

[KK20]

Its primarily the anti spam im looking for (puremessage has really let us down and the support has fallen pretty short of acceptable) and we aren't going to move to office 365, on premises will be the order of the day here.

[Norphy]

We use Censornet for our email filtering. It supports ingress and egress filtering. It will support cloud email and on premise. They give you unlimited student filtering if you license all of your staff. The filter is cloud based, situated on their servers. You need to change your MX record to point at their servers and use them as a smart host for outgoing. They will support as many domains as you have.

 

I find it to be good, for the most part it sits out of the way doing its thing without very much input from me which is exactly what you want from it. Support has been universally excellent when I’ve contacted them and the company is British so you get local support from them too.

 

Our last quote for renewal was in the region of £19k for 800 users for three years.

 

In the past, I’ve used Mimecast which, hand on heart, is a better product but a lot more expensive.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Norphy

[forkies]

We use spamtitan, we installed on a virtual appliance and since then basically haven’t touched it, does an amazing job compared to our previous systems.

[russlp]

We use HostingSystems, https://hostingsystems.uk/businessemail/exchangeserverfeed/

 

Pretty affordable and works really well - we found it catches more than PureMessage ever did. Not sure if they do outgoing scanning too but sure they would be happy to help.

[TechMonkey]

Its primarily the anti spam im looking for (puremessage has really let us down and the support has fallen pretty short of acceptable) and we aren't going to move to office 365, on premises will be the order of the day here.

 

Have a word with Vipre then. We have been with the system that has cycled between a few different names and it has kept our issues low. Allows visibility for those times someone complains that an email never was sent or if we have to find if it hit our network at all. It is cloud based and we used it successfully with both an onsite Exchange and with O365. We are paying £1650 a year, that is for 145 licenses but covers us with 550 pupils and 130 staff. That is a historical price though so I can't guarantee that will be what is offered now.

 

It does have optional extras, like sand boxing and link re-writing, but you don't have to have them.

[KK20]

Ive been given a nod to Panda. Ive used the free version of family PCs but dont have much in the way of other experience with them . Was advised to look at their adaptive 360 as that covers ingress and egress spam (we currently throttle policy egress and recipients our students as a precaution for compromised accounts) but also endpoint. Price point is slightly cheaper than Sophos for us. Any experience with Panda? Am also looking at VIPRE currently too.