Fortinet FortiMail Reviews

The solution is easy to use and easy to configure. It has a very high level of security through special licensing with solutions like FortiGuard, sandboxing solutions in the cloud, and URL rewriting solutions. They are very helpful and secure.

We can install FortiMail products in two different types of installations. One is the security gateway, the inner gateway, and the other is the enterprise mail server. But we never used this product as an enterprise mail server, only a security gateway.

The logging information is sometimes not clear or easy to understand. When the product drops or rejects an email, it is hard to understand what was the original reason why this email was blocked. The logging and the troubleshooting have to improve.

The Forti solutions are not easy to use. We can learn how to use them, but they are not easy. Suppose you must deal with different types of Fortinet products, such as FortiMail, FortiGate, and FortiAuthenticator. In that case, you have to use many different types of troubleshooting, such as through CLI commands and parameters, and it's not too easy to know those off the top of your head.

I've worked with Fortinet FortiMail for four or five years.

I rate FortiMail's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate FortiMail's scalability a nine out of ten. My clients are typically medium to enterprise-sized businesses. Enterprise and medium businesses are not the same from a Fortinet point of view. Especially here in Hungary, which is a little country. When we consider a company enterprise-sized, it might be considered a medium-sized company in the international environment.

I like Fortinet's technical support. But it could always be better.

Positive

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten.

If there is only one gateway in the environment and it's the first deployment, it's easy. However, the initial setup can be difficult if you have to integrate and migrate from different products or solutions.

It took about a week to deploy the solution. But it depends on the difficulty of the environment. Sometimes, we must migrate policies, rules, and other configuration parts from different old mail gateways, such as Symantec Brightmail. And it's not too easy to configure all of the parameters exactly in the new environment.

FortiMail is not cheap. The basic license is not bad, but the high level of solutions is not cheap. Our customers like the basic license but find it too expensive to buy detailed technical solutions.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail a nine out of ten.

We use the solution to scan the email for phishing or spam. We filter those emails, send them to the server and then deliver them to the end users.

The solution has all the essential email scanning features, including bulk scanning, fraud detection, etc.

Sometimes, authentic emails get blocked by the solution's firewall. In this case, our network team has to keep tuning the device from time to time.

We have been using the solution for the last five years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have 3000 solution users in our organization.

The solution's technical support is good.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is easy. In case of any difficulties, we contact the vendor's support team. The process involves configuring the policies of the device as part of the information security.

The solution is reasonably priced compared to Cisco.

It is an old and excellent product. You can use it on your organization's core system. I rate it a seven out of ten.

It is an email security solution used to protect the email from spam, phishing, and URL redirection attacks. I used to place Fortinet FortiMail just after their internet server. So they create multi-layered architecture to protect their servers, their users, or SMTP servers from spam emails. One of the users is only using Fortinet FortiMail to relay the outbound email because he is facing some issues. The mailbox they have is not able to send bulk emails, for example, at the bank, they used to send bulk emails regarding some offers or advertisements. The SMTP server must be expandable email.

They have a feature called CDR, Content Disarm, Reconstruction, click protection, and DLP for encryption purposes.

I have faced issues from one of the customers that they received spam emails. I think they need to look into it and improve their signatures. They can do this by adding more signatures to block spam emails.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiMail for the past three years now.

It is stable and we have not experienced any technical issues with Fortinet FortiMail.

Technical support is very good. 

They provide two types of Fortinet FortiMail. The first one is the box you need, the hardware. You just have to mount it in the rack and there is a configuration, actually, that you have to learn. If I am going to configure that it will take three to four hours. Then we can launch it live and move it into the production environment. Then there are other solutions that are VM-based and their configuration is the same, but the two differences are that it is not a physical box but a virtual machine and requires designing like ESXi or Hyper-V.

Fortinet FortiMail has an annual license agreement.

I would rate Fortinet FortiMail an eight out of ten.

They offer a range of features like firewalls, email, endpoint security, etc. Fortinet’s support services are good. We can provide a demo for customers to see email filtering during their POC.

The product's cybersecurity features could be better compared to Proofpoint.

I have been using Fortinet FortiMail as an integrator and reseller for four years.

The product is stable.

The product is scalable.

The product's technical support team is good.

Some customers find Fortinet easier to use, while others prefer Proofpoint. There are differences in catching malicious emails and handling false positives in both solutions. Based on customers' feedback, Proofpoint is often seen as more robust but comes with a higher cost.

The initial setup is easy. Anyone with an experience in email security solutions can install it. Deployment time depends on the environment; it may take as little as two days or up to two weeks. It requires one executive to implement and maintain it. The product needs tuning every one or two months for maintenance. The engineer has to check for email caches.

Fortinet FortiMail is inexpensive.

You have to consider the specific environment's requirements, including the cost and its impact on the business while looking for a vendor.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail a seven out of ten.

The solution provides security for our mail system. We're a group of companies, mainly dealing with car importation and distribution, and I'm the CIO.

This solution has a very clean user interface. It's agnostic to whatever environment you're using behind it. My email servers are HCL Domino servers now and it's easy to implement - they have very good sandbox for checking email without the danger of opening them.

I think their statistics and the BI in general could be improved. By that I mean the feedback the admin can take from the reporting. We're in the process of moving to Microsoft 365. We have discussed employing the Fortinet cloud solution with them, because right now we're using the on-premise solution. I don't know how it's going to play out in the cloud version.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

It does the job that it needs to do, it's quite stable. 

I haven't checked the scalability, because we have bought the larger version, which is the 32 VMs. I think it's pretty scalable. We have around 400 users, basically everybody in the company and we use it as a gateway. It gets all the email and takes it from our mail servers. We have two people in the company maintaining the solution and two others monitoring things. 

We have a contract with a partner for technical support, not Fortinet Greece. We used to use Fortinet Greece, but they're mainly sales engineers so we took on a partner. We're satisfied with them. 

We used another solution several years back. The trigger to move to Fortinet was a virus, a ransomware and that's when we switched to Forti products. We're happy with things. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, it was easy to implement. 

We're using two products, the FortiSandbox, which is actually the sandbox environment of FortiMail and FortiMail. We're paying about 9,000 Euros per year for those two products. It is pretty cost-effective for Greece. Fortinet is very aggressive with their pricing.

The other options we looked at were Check Point perhaps or Barracuda. Either they didn't have the sandbox solution or it wasn't as centralized as we wanted and they were more expensive. 

It's important to know what you're aiming for beforehand and what your environment needs in terms of implementation. It requires being very explicit so you can know what to set up with it. Things such as rules and domains that you can work with. You have to know your environment well. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

The primary use case for this solution is for filtering emails, internally and for external emails. We have part with Office 365 and the other is hosted inside. We have monitoring and certain policies regarding emails, both in sending and receiving them. 

The deployment Model is on-premises using a virtual machine.

This a user-friendly solution.

Troubleshooting is very simple because you can see where the email was not delivered and why it would be considered as spam. For the IT team, it is important, because when they are asked by management why their email was not sent or why was this email that was sent to me was considered as spam, they have the details that are needed to explain why. 

It is much better than IronPort for Cisco and Websense. 

For now, as per our experience with FortiMail in handling a large number of emails and spams as well, in the past three years, we have been protected and saved from any attacks from the outside. This is one of the main reasons we will continue to use FortiMail.

The dashboard is small, it doesn't have a huge dashboard that you can rely on, you need another application to work with it, which is why they created FortiAnalyzer. This allows you to dig deeper if you want details. For example, it would tell you from which domain, to what domain, and what are the triggers that have been used to classify this email. These are all extra features, it is not an all in one.

Some of the dashboards found in the FortiAnalyzer could be improved. For the basics, the solution covers it. 

An additional feature that could be added is a pop-up screen notifying you that an email has been blocked, without having to double click on it to take you there it could provide you with a summary explaining why it was on hold or why was it spam when you hover over it with your cursor.

I have been using this solution for three years.

This solution is very stable. I don't remember the last time that I had to restart the server.

This is the main mail filter, for our entire company.

They are different, not of the same email. One for Office 365 and the other is Lotus and other mail services.

Not only one service in our system, but it is configured on that one main filter using different platforms, acting as the main suitor for FortiMail.

There are approximately five hundred users, with two administrators and three at the help desk. They can do minor duties such as releasing emails, but not going into why were the emails blocked. They help to release emails that are blocked for users, who cannot release them on their own. We do, however, have limited system privileges for the administrators.

The administrators maintain the solution. The administrators will search for new firmware, find the new releases, and whether it is beneficial or not needed.

This solution is scalable at the start. You don't have any boundaries for upgrading or downgrading.

The Virtual Machine can hold as much as you want, but of course, every Virtual Machine has its capacity. You cannot take the capacity that is needed now, but rather, you have to think forward. For example, maybe now you have twenty emails, but next year we're going to have fifty emails more, and you end up with seventy, so now you reach one hundred.

While every Virtual Machine has its limitations, the limitation of every Virtual Machine is large.

We do not plan to increase usage.

The technical support was good. They are perfect.

The support is open and support is with FortiGate. They always reply and they are always there to support you within an hour, at the maximum. 

Everything will be shown in your inbox. 

We develop our products, and we do our troubleshooting without relying on the support.

If we reach a stage where we can't do anything more, then we contact support. It has been approximately two years since we last contacted them.

Previously we used a different solution. We switched to FortiMail because our old solution was not good, or stable.

We used many solutions before, including Sophos Email, and when you have a good experience with a product you will not go back to the old products or switch to other products unless there are big advantages.

Emails were not accurate, some emails on the first day were in your inbox and another day, they are quarantined, and then other days they were not being delivered.

There were limitations in the configuration and troubleshooting. 

We have always had SLAs, but not with the company, it was with the brand. For example, we had support from Cisco and Sophos between one and three years.

We directly open cases with them. Two cases were not closed. I had completed my troubleshooting and solved the issue, while they were not able to solve it. 

Cisco was too complicated, not user-friendly, and not designed for emails in that complex environment. For an easier environment, they were fine, but, not for a complex environment, with different main servers, and different platforms.

Cisco is also more expensive than others. I don't know why, especially now, with technology in the hands of every brand.

Cisco is not the one and only, but now, it is the last and only.

This is why we are no longer using Cisco. We did have a good experience with Cisco. Everything was tested. I asked the suppliers, the brand owners in the region, to come over to see us. I didn't just go to Fortinet FortiMail directly.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment time varies depending on if you are doing research, or if you are going to post on your site regarding FortiMail. If it is one domain it will take one day, or if it is for ten domains that have to be checked on to see the main flow and to see everything, it can take anywhere from one to three days.

We had only one staff member for the deployment of this solution.

To have it fully deployed and for fine-tuning, it will need ten working days. At some points, there is mail that you receive and not able to detect them, for example, all of the mail you are getting are spam or are getting quarantined or they are not quarantined, they are just trespassing in, you need approximately ten days. It's similar to machine learning, where you can learn your emails and how they flow. 

Simply put, the implementation is one to three days and for fine-tuning, it is ten days.

We used the reseller and the technical people to work with us, but the configurations and the policies are from my recommendation.

The resellers are awesome!

The time needed for troubleshooting before was reduced by at least 80%. This allowed us to focus on other applications as well, not only the web filter, email filter, and applications for the firewall. 

We have taken away some applications that we used to monitor our network with, as they were offered in FortiGate, so we no longer needed them.

Many areas helped us in reduced costs, not only in the administration in these areas, but in replacing other services that we used to buy. For example, If you want to have wireless access points so that people can access on their mobiles, we would have had to purchase a radio-server and an expensive wireless access point which was needed together. 

Access points that would cost between sixty and eighty dollars, you can have them with FortiGate on a switch, allowing you to monitor all of these from the FortiGate. 

You have all of the security, you can create your policies and you can do all the measurement and shaping and applications of vision monitoring. Everything can be done through FortiGate.

These are some of the advantages that FortiGate have over all the others. 

It's multi-platform. 

As long as you work more on the configuration and you dig deep inside the policies, you can reach huge worlds, and the security layers, not seven, layer eight and nine because intelligence and security are there. 

You have all it backs-up with the company. So yes, several things have been changed and replaced.

We are satisfied with the pricing of this solution.

Licenses are based on everyone's needs. If you don't need the full bundle that includes everything, you have options for the small or medium enterprise environments.

I was doing both the evaluating and testing. 

I had researched the internet for the leaders.

I did not go with Gartner as they pay to gain leadership. I went to other sources. I went to reviews, and I opened cases in everyone. I evaluated Barracuda, IronPort Cisco, Sophos, FortiMail and Websense.

I evaluated every one of the five brands and it took five months of testing all brands before we made the decision to go with FortiMail. We chose FortiMail because they passed all of the tests. The POC was for one month.

Emails are dangerous to deal with. You need backdoors for all people, You don't have any control over it because you are not the person who's dealing with emails for the employees.

Everyone is dealing with their own emails. In order to secure your emails, you need to secure your employees and the emails that are trespassing into your environment.

You need to find a solution that not only scans emails, but you also need to have some artificial intelligence for the machine learning for emails.

That's what FortiMail is doing. 

FortiMail is flexible, straightforward, and easy to troubleshoot. This is key, for  IT, they need to troubleshoot easily, and need to know why and how this was done. 

FortiMail is one of the important applications that can provide us what we require, as well as, being able to delegate your troubleshooting and your administration with many players or many, team members in IT. There are some that can do it while others cannot.

You should test before you decide to own a product. Don't rely on people saying, that it's the best product I have. You should know what your business is working with. There are no best practices in IT. There is what the business needs in IT.

The best practices that are there, are by the books, but the business may require different paths than the books and the best practices they tell you. So, always test. Know why and what you need the services for and don't buy everything, because you will not have time to be working on all of them.

If you have things set up straightforwardly, and it is fast to configure, then, yes, these products are good for you. The differences are, the experience and stability of these products, and how far you can go with the policies. This is what I have learned, not only from FortiMail but from all the solutions we're working with.

Never put your business and IT aside. They should collaborate and align together.

Overall, this is a good and reliable application.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for its anti-spam properties. In order to protect our mail server in our data center from spams, we need an anti-spam program. 

The solution helps me to do internal routing and to configure interfaces. FortiMail works on the profile.

I would like it if the solution could be more affordable.

The solution is very, very stable. We've had only one problem with FortiMail in the past when our internal hard-disk broke down due to a bad sector on the disk. My colleague contacted FortiMail's technical team, and they replaced it for us. This was bad for us because our systems were down for three days. But up to now, that was our only issue with this solution.

We have about 300 users and we plan to increase our usage by opening new branches and new factories. So I believe the program is scalable. 

The technical team was very helpful. Our only issue was that, because we are in Egypt, Fortinet had to use their distributors in Egypt to fix our problem, and that is why it took three days to get the hard disk, install it and reconfigure it. Luckily our last configuration didn't take up much time, only about one hour, thanks to a backup of the last configuration that was available online. But if it has to be shipped from the distributors, it will take three days at least.

My company previously used a software but when using an anti-spam solution as a hardware, it's better than an application, because an application could be corrupted.

My company pays around 28.000 Egyptian Pounds per year for this program. It is rather expensive in my opinion.

We compared it to Sophos, but it is more for users that aren't IT experts. It is so easy that anyone can use it - even my young child can configure Sophos. But for Fortinet, you need an IT expert. This is why we chose Fortinet, and we found that it is a very good solution.

I've also been using Cisco and it's a very good firewall. It's an old program, but it's doing its job for me. I use it for deviant connections and for publishing my internal server to the internet. So the Cisco firewall is also doing its job very well.

I rate this program a ten out of ten, because it's configured right. The person who configured it actually knows what the real function of anti-spam is. It protects me from cryptography. I do see some connection delay from time to time, but I believe it is because of the Sandbox check. 

I have one deployment, which is a service provider, so it's working in a multi-tenancy environment. At least ten customers are being handled by this multi-tenant Fortinet FortiMail. We use Fortinet FortiMail mainly for incoming messages and also as a server.

In the first presentation we did, we were able to demonstrate to our client that 98.2% of the emails they received were spam emails. Furthermore, out of the spam emails, around 2,000 messages were found to contain viruses. Fortinet FortiMail was able to block these 2,000 virus-infected messages that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Since we use Fortinet FortiMail as a multi-tenant environment in our cloud, we also save our customers' bandwidth as the spam emails are not downloaded.

The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiMail are its virus outbreak prevention and FortiSandbox integration.

Fortinet FortiMail should allow more flexibility with the content rules. FortiMail does not allow users to use the content itself as a matching policy attribute. This limits the flexibility of policy configuration, and we have to adapt by using specific sources to apply specific content filtering.

I have been using Fortinet FortiMail for the past seven to eight years.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail an eight out of ten for scalability. We are expanding our customer base with Fortinet FortiMail because security is now perceived as an investment in Brazil.

Fortinet FortiMail's deployment is straightforward. It's not like plug-and-play, but if you use the default configuration, you can enable very strict security without digging into the configurations.

Since we started offering the anti-spam with FortiMail as a service, we have moved from OpEx to CapEx.

I am using the latest version of Fortinet FortiMail. Users need to understand the SMTP standards to configure Fortinet FortiMail properly. If you make mistakes in the configuration, you may allow users on the internet to use your email as an MTA. This was the mistake committed by one of our customers who tried to deploy the solution himself without proper knowledge. You must have some knowledge about the solution so you can internally configure it.

Overall, I rate Fortinet FortiMail an eight out of ten.