Steve’s Tech Log

I’m testing a trial of Antigen 9.1.1097 SP1 paired with Microsoft Exchange 2003. I really wish someone had written a review of this software. Granted we are using an evaluation copy, I wouldn’t have wasted my time on this lousy piece of junk.

I have read the best practices documentation and done the following:

1. Set the SpamCure Engine to update every 15 minutes (although this seems a little ridiculous to me)
2. Configured 3 RBLS: sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, dnsbl.njabl.org, and bl.spamcop.net
3. Aggressively configured (SCL 7 - block, SCL 3 - move to Junk folder) and enabled IMF in Exchange
4. Updated IMF through Windows Update
5. Setup some Keyword filters
6. Forwarded some false negatives to Spam.mail-filters@antigen.microsoft.com

Microsoft recommends that you install Antigen on every Exchange server you have in your organization. But it’s a resource hog, requiring 1GB of RAM. I don’t know about you, but my Exchange servers don’t have an extra gig to spare. Because of this, it does not scale well to a large number of users.

The interface is poorly organized and SLOW. It has locked up on me several times.

Antigen does not have a spam score setting. Messages are tagged as either spam or ham, without a grey area. SpamAssassin can be comfigured to rewrite the header of the email to include the tests failed. If you find spam still going to your mailboxes there are no tweaks you can make on the back end.

Here I come SpamAssassin.…