Sophos ES4000 Security Appliance

For anti-spam testing we left the appliance chugging away in the background for over two weeks. The appliance monitoring and alerting functions worked well as on occasion we opted to power off the system and received an email from Sophos advising us that contact had been lost. There were also times when the system required a reboot after which a service didn't restart and we were duly advised of this. We had the system set to look for updates every five minutes and once in a while it failed to connect to the support site. For these events we also received email alerts with a request to contact Sophos' support.

For anti-spam performance we were mightily impressed with the appliance's capabilities. Our anti-spam policy was set to quarantine all suspect messages with high and medium scores and during this period the account received a total of 632 messages of which 244 were quarantined as spam. Only 18 spam messages slipped through Sophos' net giving a high accuracy score straight from the box of a shade over 97 per cent. Usefully, the appliance offers web access to users allowing them to check their own spam messages and after further investigation in the account's quarantine area we also found no false positives.

Along with a fine performance, the ES4000 offers good reporting facilities. The reports home page provides a complete rundown on mail volumes, alerts and traffic patterns and you can drill down deeper to view daily, weekly, monthly and yearly mail trend graphs. You can see who has been sending and receiving the most spam and analyse policies to see their effectiveness. Results can be printed and exported although it's a pity that only the CSV format is supported.

Our only real criticisms of the ES4000 are that the management interface can be a tad sluggish at times and the appliance hardware could be better considering the price. Nevertheless, Sophos' first move into appliance territory for messaging security sets a high standard as we found the ES4000 easy to deploy and manage and anti-spam accuracy even on the default settings is extremely good.