Messaging Gateway

Can someone explain to me the benefits of using an 8160 appliance to throttle spam over what's available today in the latest version 8300 appliances with IP reputation/SMTP traffic shaping? 

Assuming my 8300 is at the gateway already...

How are they different..  I have read the 8160 whitepaper and it seems to being saying what I think the 8300 is already capable of doing

Thanks

Chuck

Hi Chuck,

The Brightmail Traffic Shaper(formerly 8160) is a bit more powerful in that it works on the TCP layer and not the application layer as the SBG(formerly 8300) does.  Because of this it can actually enforce more stringent controls than the SBG currently can and can handle higher loads of volume.

This line is gettig a bit greyer again especially with the enhanced Connection Classification which is coming in the SBG 8 in the near future. 

We would normally recommend the Traffic Shaper to large enterprises and ISP's who are hitting the multi million messages a day mark. If you aren't seeing volumes that high, the the SBG should do just perfectly.

Hi Kevin,

We are processing about 1.8M messages per 24 hour period, and 75% is getting dumped because of IP reputation by the SBG

Hey Chuck,

Sounds like you are doing pretty good to me, another thing to keep in mind is even if you did check out the Traffic Shaper you would still need to have the SBG in place as the Traffic Shaper doesn't have an MTA. Before you even considered the Traffic Shaper you definitely want to check out the new Connection Classes and expanded global reputation lists coming out with the release of the SBG 8, I think you'll be well impressed.  So after you dump 75% because of reputation, what further percentage gets caught as spam and what percentage is clean?

Would be great for you to post up again a few weeks after you've upgraded to tell us the same figures again, I'd love to know what kind of difference you see.

Kevin 

21% is caught as spam, 4% is clean.   Even with these impressive numbers I would bet the 1/3 of clean mail is really spam that is not being caught..  That's why we are looking to see how we can improve on what we are doing.

I'm looking forward to what SBG 8 brings to the table.

Hi,

I thought i'd chime in with some numbers from the beta of SBG 8.0.

We saw customers (running in production) moving up from ~75-80% spam caught at connection time to at least 90% based on global reputation and the new Adaptive Reputation Management.

There's also the Bounce Attack Prevention - NDR Spam (aka backscatter) is quite prevelent these days.  We should be knocking that out of your system with 8.0 too.

Of course, everyone's mail profile is somewhat different but you should expect to see some really good results once you've upgraded to 8.0.

:)

//ian