• Product: FrontBridge TrueProtect Message
• Direct Price: $1.45 per user per month, and up
• Company Info: FrontBridge Technologies Inc., 877-301-8232, www.frontbridge.com

FrontBridge TrueProtect Message Management Suite is a hosted spam-filtering service, much like the Postini solution in our roundup. The tools and management interface provided by TrueProtect are not as rich as Postini's, but some administrators might prefer the simpler management capabilities.

The Web interface for administration is simple. The guts of the administrative features are in the Manage Domains page. There you can specify what happens to messages filtered as spam: FrontBridge can mark up a custom header or the subject line, forward the message to a specific account, or send it to SpamShark—a Web interface for users to manage their spam. There users can report on false positives and delete actual spam. Another option lets users receive e-mail reports of what SpamShark is holding as spam.

Separate pages let administrators manage other administrators and create or delete regular user accounts. By default, mail sent to an unspecified account in TrueProtect's filtered domain will create a new account to filter the mail. This could result in a large number of accounts in the event of a directory harvest attack, but unused accounts will expire after 30 days.

TrueProtect delivers the best reporting interface of the products we tested. Not only can you export data to a CSV file for use in Excel (as do the others here), but you can also generate graphs online—a useful feature for checking on the mail mix of your company. TrueProtect also provides anti-virus filtering with the Symantec and Sophos scanners, as well as a content-filtering feature that can block specified character sets and file types.

TrueProtect's false-positive rate on our tests is excellent (0.3 percent). The service's poor scores in spam detection at least in part reflect a limitation of our tests. FrontBridge uses a proprietary blacklist and refuses connections from those mail servers. Our mail tests forwarded mail through our own servers, denying FrontBridge the opportunity to block mail from these servers and certainly exaggerating the amount of spam that got through.

Using the FrontBridge service is a total e-mail commitment. As the company's instructions say, mail.global.frontbridge.com must be the primary and only MX record. If you want to filter only some domains or accounts, it's possible to do this, but all your mail will still flow through FrontBridge.

If you're in the market for a hosted filtering service, we think Postini does a better job overall, but Postini's tools are certainly more complex for administrators. A midsize business might prefer the easier entrée that TrueProtect delivers.