Several years ago at a UN confab, Robert Horton said spam was “a disease which has spread around the world.”  The International Telecommunications Untion (the telecom arm of the UN) had launched a push to put an end to the vast majority of spam by the end of 2006 and, unfortunately, ended as most UN meetings typically do.  Lots of talk.  Lots of shoulda-woulda-coulda.  Lots of nothing right after.

Putting an end to spam has been a hot topic for years, and recently there have been some pretty good software solutions to kill spam on blogs, but what about the corporate email systems?

I recently learned about SpamTitan, which allows companies to create an email appliance offering protection from virii, spam, malware, phishing and unwanted content.  What really caught my eye was the “email appliance” aspect.  Quite often, spam filters are software solutions that run on an existing operating system and shares resources with the rest of the server applications.  However, SpamTitan runs on it’s own operating system and is relatively light when compared to other OSes used in the corporation.

Hardware requirements are rather light, with a Pentium IV-class processor, 512 MB of RAM and a light 40 Gig of disk space required.  At almost every place I’ve worked at in the last few years, there has always been some older servers collecting dust in the back that could easily fit the bill for a SpamTitan server.

If you don’t have an extra computer lying around, SpamTitan also offers a VMWare image that can be brought online within minutes.  This virtual machine image is certainly worth consideration, too.  One of the biggest concerns administrators have is recovery from a server failure.  With virtual machines, if the main server fails, the images can be quickly brought online somewhere else.  This gives the administrator time to repair the main server, while the company continues operating with little percieved downtime.

According to the SpamTitan website, the application supports multiple domains, double anti-virus protection (both Kaspersky and ClamAV), fully automated backups and reporting, both administrator and end-user quarantine management, and an easy to use web-based GUI.

All in all, this is a great solution for any business that hosts their own email server and have trouble with spam or are unsatisfied with their current filtering application.  The high degree of accuracy in the filtering mechanism certainly makes SpamTitan worth a look.  Try it free for 30 days.