Antispam appliance

what is an appliance machine?
An Appliance is a machine that is built to handle a specific task.
There are all sort of Appliances.
We have Mail server, Anti virus, Firewall, VPN, Backup as well as Anti spam appliances. These are all machines (standard of custom fitted) installed with one objective in mind, namely to help the administrator to handle either mail, anti virus, firewall, VPN, Backup or Anti spam problems without forcing the administrator to install their own machines or programs.

Antispam appliance

Anti-spam appliances are hardware devices integrated with on-board software that implement anti-spam techniques (e-mail) and deployed at the gateway or in front of the mail server. They are normally driven by an operating system optimized for spam filtering. They are generally used in larger networks such as companies and corporations, ISPs, universities, etc.

Reasons anti-spam appliances might be selected instead of software could include:

• The customer prefers to buy hardware rather than software
• Ease of installation
• Operating system requirements (e.g. company policy requires Linux, but software is not available under this OS)
• Independence of existing hardware

Here are some of the items that you should check before taking a decision.

• Price of appliance
• Support. If you have a appliance machine, then you would probably want support. check to see to what extent the organization where you buy the anti-spam appliance can fulfill your need for support.
• Track record for the company developing the appliance. Financial stability, trustworthiness.
• Performance. How much throughput do you need.
• What kind of redundancy or backup do you need.