Mail Filtering

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

We've been using MailRoute for a few years for our first line of defence mail gateway. This license is included with our SmoothWall UTM. SmoothWall are discontinuing their relationship with MailRoute, and hence I am now looking for alternatives.

 

I was wondering if anyone can recommend a replacement product that has favourable educational pricing? Continuing with MailRoute directly isn't an option as they don't have a proper educational model; licensing all staff and students is several thousands of pounds per year!

 

I know a lot of Schools now have mail delivered directly to 365 and then pay for Defender for Office 365 P1 or P2 on their EES subscription. However I find the hosted quarantine interface so slow and clunky for releasing mail - is it improved at all with with P1/P2 licensing?

 

 

Thank you

[smarties11]

Anyone?!

[Rob_D]

Check out Barracuda. We don't use it, but they've got some good email protection stuff.

[tom_newton]

Sadly when I first contracted with Mailroute it was because nobody else could get the price anywhere near edu requirements. At the time we had a VERY big discount off their list price, but we now have so few anti-spam customers we are under the minimum spend for that product, and it's not financially viable (we are now heavily subsidising those who remain).

Most folk manage with Microsoft's anti-spam options I think

[CrootUK]

Barracuda +1

[MatthewL]

Avanan which is Check Point I think now seems to be a popular one.

[FN-GM]

On 29/08/2025 at 19:34, smarties11 said:

is several thousands of pounds per year!

 

You're going to struggle to find a quality product that will be cheaper than this.

[Norphy]

Indeed. The last time I looked at it for Education, Censornet was the best value option for me as you only paid for staff; they threw in student accounts for free. For 700-ish staff, I think the cost was in the region of £14k for three years. Bear in mind that was more than five years ago that I last looked at it.

 

Others, such as Mimecast, were significantly more expensive.

Edited September 3, 2025 by Norphy

[altecsole]

We have Barracuda Essentials with includes Email Gateway - this works well and catches the vast majority of unwanted emails. It also includes Email Archive, which is also very useful. In addition, we've added Impersonation Protection and Incident Response, which are both very good.

[smarties11]

Thanks everyone. I'm going to check out Barracuda as that seems to be a popular option here 🙂

[smarties11]

On 02/09/2025 at 23:47, FN-GM said:

 

You're going to struggle to find a quality product that will be cheaper than this.

 

We can get MS Defender for 365 P2 for about £1300 a year to cover our 105 staff, then students are free. I'm sure this is a good product in terms of catching e-mails, but it's an absolute dog to use for releasing e-mails if it uses the same Managed Quarantine system that is included as standard with 365 mailboxes 😕

[TechMonkey]

We use the higher level of Exchange protection, can never remember the name.  It works, not going to say it catches 100%, but to me seems effective.

In the past I have used Vipre, which was FuseMail and that was good and gave a lot of features but once you started adding in sandboxing and more advanced features it was less cost effective than the exchange protection.

[pete]

One of our schools (who use Mailroute via Smoothwall) just found out that "Smoothwall are discontinuing their relationship with mailroute" by having email delivery broken circa midday today by Mailroute terminating the service.

 

@tom_newton to whom was the advance warning about this sent?  The last email I've had regarding Mailroute was in September 2023.

[tom_newton]

That's likely to be a mistake on our part - there was no intention to delete anything today

[tom_newton]

There should certainly have been warning from your CSM that the service was going away over the past few months, but anything that's vanished today is an error

[tom_newton]

Have you got a support ticket?

[pete]

No - I emailed Caroline H (or CSM) with a "Mailroute are saying the below, what's the Smoothwall side of things?"  I'll PM you the details.

 

I've just spent the last hour our so faffing about pulling together working mail delivery for the school.

 

With "the below" being:

 

Hi there,

 

Smoothwall is discontinuing your MailRoute service as part of your contract with them.

 

To retain your data and the reliable service you’ve been using, let’s discuss being a direct customer of MailRoute.

 

I noticed they have your account set to auto-add which doesn’t take advantage of the proprietary integration we have with o365. Using that tool alone would streamline and improve your account management.

 

Let’s discuss how to improve your experience and continue protecting your staff, faculty and student accounts. I’m available at your convenience.

 

Best regards,

 

 

[leegcvcc]

I use cloud filter HornetSecurity and then Office 365 rules and quarantine.  Staff get quarantined email alerts every couple of hours, students don't as their playstation promo emails aren't important. Any email domains they should receive mail from are added to 'allow' lists.