MessageLabs SkyScan AS By Richard V. Dragan February 25, 2003

• Product: MessageLabs SkyScan AS
• Direct Price: 10 users, $102 per year
• Company Info: MessageLabs Ltd., www.messagelabs.com

Editor Rating:

MessageLabs SkyScan AS excels in spam detection accuracy and offers no-hassle administration. Although the solution lacks extensive customizability, most organizations won't miss a thing because of its effectiveness at fighting spam; SkyScan yielded the best results on our tests, producing the cleanest in-boxes of any solution. But we are disappointed in the service's lack of a tool for retrieving good e-mail that it considers spam.

As with other hosted services, SkyScan AS works with your SMTP mail servers in a store-and-forward setup. After we directed our MX records to one of MessageLabs' 17 mail-processing centers, called control towers, antispam protection was operational. With towers in the U.K., the Netherlands, Hong Kong, New York, and Washington, D.C., MessageLabs has a global reach. You can also designate a backup tower for fail-over. According to the company, each tower consists of server racks powered by Red Hat Linux 6.2 and qmail.

You can administer SkyScan AS via any Web browser. Administrators can control which spam detection methods to use, including heuristics powered by MessageLabs' proprietary Skeptic engine. The service also supports tapping open relay databases (ORDBs), relay spam stoppers (RSSs), and IP or domain blacklists. In testing SkyScan AS, we relied on heuristics alone, allowing the product to catch the largest percentage of spam among all we reviewed.

According to MessageLabs, its patented Skeptic engine uses from 600 to 700 rules to detect spam. As with Postini's offering, SkyScan AS analyzes traffic patterns within its more than 1 million monitored e-mail accounts to detect spam and virus activity. Skeptic was originally developed for spotting viruses, but MessageLabs added antispam abilities to it in 2001. Antivirus and antiporn detection modules are available within the same interface at extra cost ($1.50 and 60 cents per user per year, respectively).

As with all the solutions we examined, MessageLabs has some trouble with legitimate newsletters, by default flagging them as spam. On the issue of simplicity versus granular control, SkyScan AS weighs in with a "keep it simple" approach throughout its Web console.

You perform basic customization by inserting comma-separated IP addresses or domains into whitelists or blacklists, with a maximum of 300 in each category. We used this option to open up access to designated newsletters. Custom or default banners can be added to incoming e-mail. There are no dictionaries here (as with the CipherTrust and SurfControl solutions), but we expect you won't miss them. There's no support for delegated administration as with the Postini or SurfControl offerings.

Reporting is also kept to the essentials. You can see which methods are catching spam and drill down into a listing of caught spam. Unlike with most of the other products here, you can't view actual messages within the Web console. You can, however, mail weekly or monthly summary reports to designated administrators.

Like Big Fish and Brightmail, SkyScan requires you to rely on the vendor to do the work of analyzing and catching spam for you. Our experience suggests that this simple, low-cost antispam solution can get the job done with a minimum amount of overhead for administrators.