IMail or GMail - which is the better spam fighter?

April 15, 2008 9:14 AM

Which is a better option for controlling spam? Buying the IMail Premium Anti-Spam filter for our existing IMail mail server or migrating our mail to Google Apps for Your Domain?

The IMail solution will be far less work as it is a managed service through our hosting provider. GMail migration and support would have to be done internally.

If the anti-spam capabilities are equal, then IMail would be the best for us. Does anyone have any experience on whether IMail's solution is as good as GMail's?

posted by bcarroll to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Are you using POP3 email clients? Why not use K9, which is free? I've been using it for several years now and I swear by it.
posted by Class Goat at 9:24 AM on April 15, 2008

We may be moving to IMAP - both IMail and GMail support it, which is why I am only considering these 2 for now.
posted by bcarroll at 9:45 AM on April 15, 2008

We use IMail in-house and without any further training beyond the initial setup, the spam filter is horrific in my experience. I should also note it's just the normal spam filter that comes with the server edition- I wasn't aware of the Premium anti-spam version. Silly me.

Anyways, Out of ~4000 daily messages, I'd estimate that 90%+ of it is spam and IMail lets through a good bit of that. We could actually live with the false-negatives. It was the daily false-positives that drive me insane. I don't have the time to devote to proper spam management and plan on changing spam filters this summer, though I'm still undecided as to what. So, yea, if you don't want to do maintenance to make sure the filters are correctly working, I'm not a fan of IMail's spam filter
posted by jmd82 at 10:26 AM on April 15, 2008

We use Imail, which comes with one giant caveat- the Apple Mail client in Leopard (10.5) is incompatible with Imail's IMAP.

Aside from that, have you considered Postini for spam?
posted by mkultra at 11:40 AM on April 15, 2008

I definitely second Postini. It's what Google purchased and uses for Gmail spam filtering, and it works great! And you wouldn't have to move to a full-on Google Apps deployment to use it, either.
posted by icebourg at 12:36 PM on April 15, 2008

Given the choice between the Premium anti-spam (the horror, the horror) or Google, I'd probably go with Google since they probably filter through Postini.

If you're interested in a server installed option, we're filtering 200,000+ email through our servers using Declude for anti-spam and anti-virus. One drawback is that it doesn't "plug-in" (so to speak) into the web client, so there's no way that a client can mark what is spam if any get through. You pretty much customize it (or leave it the way it is) by editing text files ( A plus for some and a minus for others). And the tech support is pretty responsive and know what they're doing (big plus for me).
posted by badger11 at 9:15 PM on April 15, 2008