Symantec Messaging Gateway Reviews

Symantec Messaging Gateway is used for email security.

The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense.

Symantec Messaging Gateway can improve detection because most of them are false negatives or false positives that we are trying to troubleshoot. Additionally, we are having routing problems and they are somehow connected to DNS issues.

In a future release, if dynamic variables in content filtering was added it would solve a lot of problems. If we could be able to use some variables or handle the content filtering policies somehow dynamically, such as comparing today's date to a date in the content header of an email. If it was more dynamic list checking instead of static rules we usually adjust on clients.

I have been using Symantec Messaging Gateway for approximately three years.

Since Symantec Messaging Gateway is a Linux-based solution it is stable.

Symantec Messaging Gateway is highly scalable.

The technical support from Symantec Messaging Gateway is good.

I rate the support from Symantec Messaging Gateway a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of Symantec Messaging Gateway is straightforward.

I strongly recommend on-premise email security solutions. I'm strictly against cloud email security solutions, they are very problematic. There is cloud congestion for every kind of cloud-based software and the managed services are very hard to deal with for cloud-based solutions. On-premise solutions are easy to deploy and to troubleshoots. For cloud solutions, downtimes are the most prominent issue we witness. It is really difficult to be a part of cloud-based solutions since it is out of your control.

No one just wants their emails to be blocked or connection failures in their daily lives. That's why the on-premise solutions are the fastest and more manageable solutions.

Some aspects of this solution are going to expire because of the Broadcom acquisition.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Symantec Messaging Gateway a nine out of ten.

We use it for content filtering and malware protection.

Symantec Messaging Gateway is stable and scalable.

Installation is easy, and the deployment and maintenance can be done by one administrative person.

It is a nice product but is not user friendly in terms of the graphical interface. It is poor and is not rich in terms of the human interface.

We have been using it for a month.

It is stable because we use a physical appliance.

The scalability depends on how much you are willing to pay. You always have to pay if you have to scale the product or increase the number of machines. We have about 1,000 fixed users for Symantec Messaging Gateway.

Installation is easy, but we needed some configurations, so it took a week.

For the deployment and maintenance, we have one administrative person.

We implemented it ourselves using remote assistance from our supplier.

The cost of Symantec Messaging Gateway is too expensive in general. However, the appliance also includes the price of the license in the same bundle.

I haven't been using it for very long, and in my short experience, it has been a good product. I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution for its advanced virus protection, phishing and other features.

I have been using the solution for 1 year now.

It is a solid and stable product.

It is a scalable product. We have deployed it for organizations with 200-5000 users.

The support is really great.

I have used Sophos Email other than Symantec Messaging Gateway.

The setup is pretty much straight forward.

We did the deployment of the product ourselves and it was a quick one.

Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans. 

It's a bit expensive but they have licensing models to meet customer needs. 

It's a bit expensive compared to its competitor Barracuda Email Security Gateway but cheaper than Sophos Email.

I would recommend this product.

I rate Symantec Messaging Gateway an eight out of ten.

We are a consulting company and this is one of the solutions that we have implemented for our clients.

One of our clients is in the automobile industry and we implemented the entire suite that consisted of email security, network traffic security, and end-user security including the setting of permissions and restrictions. We were managing then entire security landscape for more than 100,000 users.

The feature that I like the best is the fingerprinting concept.

The keyword rules and mapping of the sequence rules are very effective and very good.

In the automobile industry, they have a research and development department where they create a lot of designs for new models. In order to maintain the confidentiality of those designs, we tried to use OCR technology. However, it was not very effective with Symantec. If this solution could manage image control restrictions for OCR-captured images then it would be very helpful.

This solution is not very efficient at discovering unstructured data, which is something that needs to be improved. Unstructured data discovery is something that is being focused on in many areas including the automobile industry, finance, banking, and elsewhere. Both Symantec and McAfee failed in this regard. When the data is structured, Symantec was very efficient because we used to get the data from the business stakeholders and the data could be scanned to map the information. Where it is not available, as is the case with unstructured data, this product fails miserably.

This solution provides good information, but the reporting is not very efficient and needs to be improved. It will provide Excel reports and PDF reports, but it would be great if they supported the concept of Crystal Reports. Alternatively, if they had a dashboard or could showcase reports on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis, it would be very good. In short, we would like a more enhanced reporting capability.

This solution should provide functionality for the classification of email. It should be automated, with a bit of manual intervention. Specifically, before a user can send an email, the solution should make sure that the classification has been set, otherwise, it should not leave the intranet. It will force the users to classify the information and only then will the email be authorized to go through the network.

I have been using Symantec Email Security.cloud for almost two years. 

This product is very stable.

It was easy to scale in both Windows and Linux environments. We did not try Mac devices, but for us, scalability was good.

We have reached out to technical support for a couple of issues, such as when we were trying to implement OCR technology. They did give us solutions, but unfortunately, they were not very effective.

With respect to the inbuilt capabilities, the support is pretty good. However, when trying something new, as expected we encountered some initial failures and they were not able to assist us with these.

We did not use other messaging security software prior to this solution.

It was easy to set up the entire security suite. There were no constraints, which made it an easy installation for us.

The deployment was completed in two phases. We first had a week-long trial run on a small LAN segment to see how efficiently it would work. Once the trial run was successfully completed, it took two weeks for full implementation across the network.

Initially, we sought support from a consultant because we had the entire Symantec security suite, and we were not well versed enough in DLP technology. We needed someone with a certain level of assurance in order to implement the complete solution, which included email security.

We evaluated McAfee and it was also unable to rectify the problem with OCR images.

This is a good solution, but ultimately I would like to see OCR capabilities, mail classification, and unstructured data discovery. If Symantec could incorporate all of this in the DLP solution then I believe it would be the leading product in the DLP market.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.