Symantec Messaging Gateway alternatives and competitors

It's our mail relay system. We are using it to filter all our incoming emails. It's also a security platform for our SharePoint and OneDrive.

The main benefit to our company is the reduction of risks with the potential to evolve into more complex security events. The solution stops those risks before they get to the end-user. We saw, when using other solutions in the past, that some of the emails that are blocked today were passing through. The overall effectiveness of this security solution is much better.

Also, our SOC team is quite minimal, so it's very helpful for us to have an external team that assists us with handling incidents. We don't have the time or the resources to handle all of them. We are currently evolving our teams and their SOC team is more effective when reviewing things. It saves us time because we don't have to do anything within the system. We can just reach out to their IR team and they will investigate and take the relevant action. It reduces some of our load.

Their portal is very convenient, very easy to use, and very good for managing. The portal also provides a great investigation process, where we can open a ticket for each email that we think should get a second opinion. Their Incidence Response team will respond.

The solution can pull emails that have already been marked as malicious from the mailboxes. Their security engines are very effective at stopping malware and potential attacks before they reach a user's mailbox. They have the best detection engine.

When it comes to the scale of scanning, the solution looks at each email, the body and each attachment, to try to detect potential malicious links or macros. It scans everything. We feel very comfortable with that. It will not miss any email. Other companies' security engines sometimes decide on their own what should be fully scanned and what should not. With Perception Point, this is not the case. Everything is fully scanned.

They could improve their anti-spam engine a little bit, because there are a lot of false positives. Sometimes, emails pass through their system but are spam. In terms of security and engines for malicious emails and antivirus, they're doing a good job. Their other engines can be improved.

This is something we discussed with them before we purchased the solution. We discussed their roadmap with their product team. The spam engine is something that they're working on. We know that their spam engine is going to improve in the very near future.

We also spoke with them about a change to the GUI so that we can release more than one email at a time. Also, if we want to open investigations into a few emails, we need to go into each email to open the investigation. When we have done onboarding within our company, there have been times when we had a lot of email that we needed to whitelist. It took a lot of time to go into each email and open a ticket. It would help if they added a feature where we could add similar emails, or more than one, to a ticket for the IR team.

We have been using Perception Point Advanced Email Security for almost three months.

So far, we have not had any problems. We know that before we went with the system there was some downtime, but we haven't had any issues.

We are not aware of any issues with scalability.

We are protecting about 3,000 mailboxes, and growing. Part of our plan is to increase our usage of Perception Point. We have additional companies that we are working on migrating and we plan to move their email traffic under this umbrella as well.

They provide good support. If we have a problem, we create a ticket in the Perception Point system. And if there is something that we don't think can be handled through the portal, we can call or email or WhatsApp our customer success manager and everything works. He replies very quickly.

Positive

We switched from Symantec Mail Security. The reason we moved forward with Perception Point was the security portfolio. We were impressed with how very effective it is.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. It didn't take a lot of time. If you want to add some domains, the whole process takes a maximum of one hour. We worked with their customer success manager and he was very responsive to us and available most of the time. We have a large company with a lot of mailboxes and in the first few days of the integration we were in direct contact with him by WhatsApp, by emails, or by phone. The integration process went very smoothly.

We were able to move from Symantec to this solution in one week, and the time to value was from the moment we started to use Perception Point. 

You don't measure security products on return on investment.

The licensing mechanism is fine. It's quite standard. The pricing was fair in comparison with the other solutions. We have received good value for what we paid.

We tried to use IronPort and Microsoft. We selected Perception Point because we liked their engine for detecting malicious emails. We also liked the GUI and the easy setup. Besides the effective security, which was a major part of our decision, we also thought that the total cost of ownership of the product would be better for us, as we are a very small team. Another factor was that it included SharePoint protection and that was an extra feature not available in other solutions that were just anti-spam systems.

It's hard to compare the detection rate among these solutions because all of them are doing a good job.

The best part of Perception Point was that the system is already configured for best practices. It does the job as well as it can be done. When we tried other solutions, they had to be configured down to the smallest details. And if there are any changes in the environment, we would always have to be ready to change the system configuration. Again, because we're a small team, we felt that it would be better for us to go with a system that is configured optimally.

Consider Perception Point. It is a very young company and it's evolving, so you need to be aware of that.

Some companies use it as a second tier of protection, not as the first tier like we do, because they have an additional product that does the initial filtering.

Check the solutions you are looking at against any additional needs you have because not all platforms provide the interfaces that might be required for some organizations.

If you go with Perception Point, you need to work with them to make sure you fine-tune your policies with their IR team, especially if you have an evolved SOC team. You need to make sure you coordinate efforts and that policies and decisions are made according to what your company requires.

We use it to protect our emails from spam, malware, viruses, as well as from attacks like spoofing.

We have seen a reduction in complaints from employees about spam, for sure.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. We like it. Every spam solution should have that kind of filtering. We don't work with African or Asian countries. We're mostly focused on North America. Blocking those regions helps a lot in protecting us from spammers who are trying to reach us. Before we implemented this feature, we saw a lot of spam coming from Vietnam, Russia, China, and India, et cetera. The geo-blocking has reduced spam a lot.

Another good feature, related to geo-blocking, is the ability to specify exemptions. We discovered that some of our customers, even though they are located in Canada, have an Exchange Server sitting in Japan or in the Netherlands. It seems they have branches or their head office in other countries. Having this exception feature is helpful.

The SpamTitan user interface is pretty straightforward. I don't see it as very complicated or difficult to navigate. It's very user-friendly. 

Within the reporting part, when you look at the history of the emails, it would help if it were more intuitive. If you don't know where it is, you have to go through many things to find it. Once you know, it's fine. It's only an issue at the beginning.

I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them. SpamTitan should find better solutions for the antivirus. What they have is not so bad but it's missing some things. Of course, no solution catches 100 percent of what's out there.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2018.

At first, we had an issue with the emails getting stuck in SpamTitan and getting old there. The emails were in a queue and didn't go out. It was a one-time issue but when I contacted support they fixed the issue and it has been working fine since then.

One thing that concerns me is that when they need to upgrade the version or the hardware, even though it's virtual machines, the unit becomes unavailable and during these kinds of maintenance, all emails stop. Other solutions have redundancy and, even as they do maintenance, it does not affect email at all.

The scalability is good. We purchased 500 licenses and then we increased the numbers because our company grew. If our company grows more, we'll add more licenses.

Their technical support is very responsible but, because of different time zone, sometimes the response is late. In the past, their response was slower but in the last year it has been much faster.

Their expertise is very good. The technical knowledge of SpamTitan's support is better than FortiClient's, for sure.

Maybe it's just the Canadian in me, but I would like it if SpamTitan's support were a little bit more friendly. They know their stuff but sometimes you feel they're not friendly. It's not all of them, but some.

Positive

We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions.

The difficulty level of the setup process is medium. You spend time understanding how it's set up and how it's configured. The hard part was understanding how we were going to switch to it and how we were going to: add the white lists and the black lists, do exceptions by IP and by domain. There are many things you need to consider.

It didn't take long to deploy. We did it really fast, within about a week. We prepared everything and then we switched one company and then another one.

When switching from one spam filter to another, you need to make sure the move goes smoothly. You run two spam filters at the same time and migrate everything.

There were a lot of false positives in the beginning. We had to tune it and manage and create exceptions. It was time-consuming to adjust everything and white-list a lot of things. It's better now but it's still catching some false positives.

We tried a few other solutions before, including FortiClient and, before I chose SpamTitan, I looked at many reviews online. One of the online suggestions I read was for SpamTitan because it does its job and it's a cost-effective solution compared to other products, like Barracuda and FortiMail. Also, the false positive rate in FortiMail was worse.

SpamTitan may not be one of the top products on the market but I think it's good enough, at least for us.

Our primary use case is the encryption tooling of email security. Emails sent externally are automatically encrypted as is all the information included. There are some DLP related options available in Proofpoint, which we enabled with the help of classifying the emails, like internal, external, private, public, sharing. That's our main use. We are customers of Proofpoint.

The value for us is that we now have much better control over emails, especially those sent via Office 365 on the cloud. We've configured it so that all emails go to Proofpoint and are quarantined or encrypted. I believe the quarantine email function is very rare to find in other solutions. It's a powerful tool and I believe cost effective.

Integration for reporting needs to be improved, it's a little complex. Right now we have integrated with Power BI to get logs and information from Proofpoint. That has to be improved with the API and there are also latency issues which need to be simplified and improved. Those are the areas I've observed that need improvement. 

The solution is hosted by Proofpoint on Amazon AWS, with some on servers on-prem. We've done the load balancing and I believe it's pretty strong now. We haven't experienced any issues. 

Scalability is good, we have around 100,000 employees. For now, we have implemented two data centers. It covers 60% of traffic. We're moving ahead so that by the end of the year we'll have 100% implementation. 

Technical support is relatively good although the solutions and ticketing system requires a lot of improvement.

We were previously using Symantec but switched to Proofpoint because Symantec didn't offer the email quarantine function. Cost was another issue with Symantec being a more expensive solution. But the main reason we switched was because we were looking for more control over the cloud email, especially with the sensitive information we have. 

The initial setup was a mixed experience. Nothing is simple nowadays and we were dealing with both cloud and on-prem, dividing the load blancing. As a result, it's taken almost six months to get full implementation. We were testing for a lot of that time. We initially implemented only in the cloud. And later on we integrated it with the reporting applications, and lastly we implemented on-prem. We are a team of seven, and implemented ourselves. I did a lot of demos and trainings which helped us a lot when it came to deploying ourselves.
We now have around 10 staff who have access to the administration portal; the project manager, a couple from the messaging team, architects, and security engineers. 

We evaluated Forcepoint and McAfee but both dropped out in the middle stage and we moved on to testing with Proofpoint. Both solutions had an easy environment, with an easy to configure and straightforward dashboard. However, when it came to security controls, including inscription and quarantine options, those things were more available in Proofpoint. 

We've observed that we have almost 99.9% control over our emails now in an easy to configure and easy to implement solution. It's simple and easy for the administration as well. We're looking forward to any upgrades or updates they provide. I recommend this solution if it suits your needs and requirements. If you have concerns about data floating in emails, it's a good solution. If that's not an issue then you can choose something else.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

The solution is very good at covering all of my organization's needs.

I've found the security to be quite good on the product.

The deployment is very easy. It's quite straightforward.

The pricing is great. It's quite fair and not too expensive.

Overall, the product has some great features.

The solution seems to be very good at iterating on past editions and continues to improve itself. I don't know if it's truly lacking everything.

It would be great if it was a bit better at protecting from the endpoints.

The solution's technical support is slow and unresponsive. You need to book time in order to get support.

I've been using the solution for about four years now.

The solution is quite stable. We've found it to be very reliable for our organization. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches. I've never experienced it crashing or freezing. It's been good.

The solution is scalable. Your organization can easily expand it if you need it to.

Currently, we have around 100 users on the solution. That would be the maximum number of users.

While Fortinet has great technical support and is quite responsive and fast, I've found that Sophos requires its users to book time for support.

Symantec was also quite helpful - more so than Sophos, which still seems to be iroing out details in terms of handling customer queries. They need to be much more responsive.

In the past, I've used Symantec products including Symantec Gateway and Symantec Endpoint Protection. When Symantec bought Barracuda, the pricing became much different. The solution seemed to offer the same features but with much higher pricing. Our company decided to go in a different direction and chose Sophos.

I still like Symantec. I used it for five years and I'm quite familiar with the product.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's not complex. 

The deployment is easy to handle. How long it takes depends on which product you want to use. It's different according to your endpoint, email service, mobile, etc. That said, it's still an easy deployment process.

Our users are able to easily maintain it themselves.

The pricing, in general, if very fair. It's definitely a positive aspect of the solution.

I've looked into Fortinet's server and some related products, however, I likely won't continue looking into them. I'd rather consider Symantec.

We're just customers. We don't have any business relationship with the company.

I'm still working with this solution and testing its capabilities. There's still so much to learn about its offerings.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at an eight. If they had better deployments for email security, I might rate them higher.

This is a total email security solution.

This product is powerful and quite simple to use.

It has a unified interface for archiving, security, and backup, all put together into one portfolio.

This product has phenomenal anti-phishing capabilities.

I would like to have better integration with third-party archival vendors to facilitate moving data in and out. This is definitely an area that should be worked on.

Having better user admin controls from an application perspective would also be helpful.

We have been using the Barracuda Email Security Gateway for about a year.

It is very stable and we have had no issues.

Because it is a cloud subscription, it is updated automatically.

In terms of scalability, we haven't had any issues. We have more than 100 users. There are a couple of administrators but most of them are end-users.

The Barracuda support is far better than Trend Micro.

Prior to Barracuda, we were using Trend Micro InterScan Messaging Security, and then we were using Symantec's Email Security. We now have all of the features that we want in a single product.

Working with Trend Micro is a little bit tricky at this point in time.

This solution is very easy to install. It took us a couple of days to deploy.

We pay between $8 and $10 USD per user per month.

Overall, this is a good product with wonderful security capabilities and I definitely recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.