Big Fish Gateway Services By Richard V. Dragan February 25, 2003

• Product: Big Fish Gateway Services
• Direct Price: 1,000 users, $12,600 per year
• Company Info: Big Fish Communications Inc., www.bigfish.com

Big Fish Gateway Services offers a no-frills antispam approach that keeps things simple for both users and administrators. On our tests it routed nearly all the legitimate mail correctly but missed almost 18 percent of the incoming spam. Among the hosted solutions we evaluated, Big Fish is arguably a little more customizable than MessageLabs SkyScan AS and a good deal less configurable than Postini Perimeter Manager. In using Big Fish's Web-based console to set up our test accounts and domain, we found that it favors simplicity, with easy-to-find features.

Spam protection comes in several layers here, including heuristics, digital fingerprints of known spam, and IP lists of known spammers. Big Fish's heuristics set the record in our roundup, processing a reported 7,000 rules on the server. (Each day, Big Fish adds or amends 250 to 350 rules.) Its fingerprinting uses a hash of each message against a database of some 100,000 known spam messages and supports fuzzy-logic matching.

Content filtering is also a separately priced option, though the term means something different in Big Fish than in other solutions. Specifically, e-mail can be filtered for malicious content, like calls to executables and CLSID entries, which might propagate e-mail viruses in outbound mail.

On our tests, Big Fish caught the smallest percentage of spam of any of our hosted products. You can add a whitelist to allow legitimate e-mail from specified sources. The related SpamShark Web interface (the end user's counterpart to the administration console) lets you view filtered messages and decide what to do with them. A nifty feature here is the ability to log on to different e-mail accounts (or aliases) at once—provided you set the same password for each.

Big Fish's Web-based control of spam queues provides clear icons for delivering or deleting suspected spam. You can also drill down into e-mail messages to view message headers and bodies, though the service doesn't offer SurfControl E-mail Filter's analytical ability to highlight exactly why a message was flagged. Like Postini's solution, Big Fish can define permissions for different user levels in larger enterprises.

The interface, however, is not perfect. It does not cooperate with Internet Explorer's Back button, which requires a repost. Updates to administration settings go live every hour on the hour, which is good enough, since fighting spam is seldom a minute-by-minute battle, but it's less than ideal.

Reporting options in Big Fish are simple but show basic activity for e-mail traffic, spam, and viruses. Simple HTML tables present at-a-glance statistics. The level of detail is not as fine as that of Postini's tool, but reporting is effective enough.

With a growing list of Fortune 1000 customers, Big Fish is already an established player, and it's the only hosted vendor that guarantees "five 9s" in uptime (99.999 percent). Because of its middle-of-the-road administrative tools, however, we think you can do better elsewhere.