I didn't know about this but it came up in a customer interaction today and I thought it was worth sharing. ICSA Labs does testing and certification of anti-spam solutions, including Lotus Protector for Mail Security.
CSA Labs certified anti-spam solutions are tested 365-days a year for effectiveness and false positives. Monthly Anti-Spam Short reports, or MASS reports, are published following the previous month's testing. Certified anti-spam solutions are tested annually against the remaining nearly 50 criteria requirementsLooks like Lotus Protector was 98.67% effective in March, 2010, with 99.2% in February and 99.36% in January. More interesting to me is that the false positive rate is zero.
Anyway, check it out.
Link: ICSAlabs: IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Security >
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Alan Hamilton http://www.sysnet.co.uk | 4/21/2010 1:13:15 AM
We have two customers running these and they have have zero false positives and in one case stops stuff MessageLabs lets through. One customer was getting 16,500 spams a day - Protector has stopped it all - with no false positives. It's Lotus' best-kept secret!
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Irv Schor | 4/21/2010 12:04:55 PM
This was mentioned in yesterday's Lotusphere Comes to You in West Chester, PA. I originally thought there was only an appliance version, but now understand there's a VM Option as well. Apparently the VDI is less costly, but can't handle as much mail throughput. Wouldn't mind hearing more about the details/cost differences between the two.
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Alan Hamilton http://www.sysnet | 4/21/2010 2:15:36 PM
@3 We have only deployed LPMS at Virtual Machines on low-end PC equipment with VMWare Player. I am not sure about the benchmarks but we have 100 users with a lot of mail on a machine with Vista Business as the host and 2Gb of RAM without any problems. The hardware cost about $350 Vista license included from Dell - so LPMS on VMWare is a cheap solution against any hosted offering. Do a 3 year TCO against MessageLabs and you'll see what I mean.
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Arthur Fontaine | 4/22/2010 8:10:58 AM
Thanks for the mention, Ed. On top of its excellent spam efficacy, Protector for Mail Security has integration with the Notes 8.51+ client, and any Domino server. Users (especially execs) love it because it lets them easily control who can send things to their inbox.
Protector for Mail Security is a simple per-user license, and includes the server software. It's a "software appliance" that includes the underlying OS as well as the content/spam filter layer. It runs on VMware or on one of four off-the-shelf System X servers, rated for throughput up to 360k messages/hour. This license model works for all sizes of customers; small companies aren't priced out by the server cost, since they can just pop up a VM as Alan points out, while large organizations with complex topologies can deploy as many instances as they want without additional server software costs.
Lastly, we announced Protector for Mail Encryption at Lotusphere 2010 and will be delivering it very (very!) soon... It enables Notes users to encrypt over the Internet as easily as Notes-to-Notes encryption has always been. Customer interest has been outstanding... Watch for more info on that as well.
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Michael Kenny | 4/23/2010 2:07:10 PM
wanted to check it out, as I needed a PGP proxy solution. was told I could check it out. was told i'd be in the beta. then the line went completely dead and lotus never got back to me. we've since moved on to looking at other solutions.
i'm a 15 year+ notes person. i did QA on the first windows server while at lotus. i've been a part of the lotus support organization. but lately my experiences on the customer side of the support experience are so awful and mishandled that not only do I worry about the competence, ability and customer focus of lotus as a whole, but I'm on the verge of a shift to a "good riddance" mind set.
this "experience" with the beta is just the latest example, and has been the subject of discussions across departments at my firm.
the frustration with lotus is high across my whole organization. we're one of the last large notes shops in our field, and pressure is high to look at other products. due almost entirely to unsatisfactory support experiences (support for which we pay big bucks) i can't say I'll shed any tears when/if we migrate away from Notes/Domino. and that's from a pretty much self-identified "notes guy."
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Michael Kenny | 5/4/2010 1:48:48 PM
Thanks Ed. Sorry to take my frustrations out here; it's not the right place for that. But this post sparked a reaction because I really wanted to be in the beta and had a need this product could fill. I also thought that a messaging engineer with decades of formal QA and Notes experiences would be useful to the beta. After the initial beta call with the Protector team, I thought it was on track, and was surprised to be ignored when what I expected, and was told to expect, a "welcome to the beta" email.
I may take you up on your offer. My/our organization's opinion of the support staff is not holding up too well. We do get some great help from engineers who are smart, focused and pleasant (lookin at you Jason B.) but too often that's not the case.
I'm now dealing with a different issue where a direct request to my support account rep is being rebuffed, ignored, blown off, and as a result my sysadmins can't do their job, my mail servers and users are at risk, and my constant and 100% reproducible SEV 1 mail file corruption issue is dragging on and on for weeks and weeks, all this, again, with my requests for how I would like to have it handled shoved aside. I'm about to blow my freakin top here, Ed. You sure you want to hear from me?
I'll take 98.67% with no false positives over 100% with a few false positives any day of the week. Think I'm gonna have to get one of these.