Spamphibian Gateway Version 1.0

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Spamphibian is a two-part process made of a Gateway and an Admin access window that can either be localized or set up to access remotely. I was permitted to try it out for 30 days and you can to by downloading the app from the Outspring website to see if it is worth the price. Then again, if you could remove Spam without ever having to be bothered with it again, how much is that really worth to you?

The manual I used was updated December 8, 2005 and it is 80 pages long. It says that Spamphibian is easy to set up and use, but the caveats are that you need to know the Email server IP and SMTP information and permission to access from the server side for this to work as advertised. You will need to hop through the manual to set Spamphibian up because of the process involved in getting things going.

The gateway is a standalone Simple Mail Transfer Protocol daemon filter. For it to function, some changes have to be made to redirect the primary MX records to the system that is hosting the gateway and the secondary MX record pointing to the Email server, wherever that may be located. Help can be found at http://www.outspring.com/support.html.

As you can see from the requirements page, a Quarantine folder has to b set up that will hold the targeted Emails for a certain period of time before they are eradicated from the folder. The gat4eway has to be up and running in test mode before accessing the admin app.

In the interest of privacy and security, I’m going to show you the canned screenshots so my host won’t get mad ad me for revealing too much about his server.

The monitor pane looks like this. And the Server pane looks like this.

There are also views to load, filtering, queues and logs. Rules can be set for domains or globally. Now the other part of this full-meal-deal is Spamcaster, which is an annual subscription service that takes things up a notch by connecting to the Outspring rules tha tare updated on a daily basis so phishing expeditions can come up empty and miscreant via filtering. There are six  rule types; domain, URL, IP address, text, attachment and regex (regular expression). Each rule has three parts; type, content and action. Actions can be either default, accept, quaratine, tag, delete or bounce.

Along with filtering there is also the Domain Name System Black-hole List (DNSBL) and the gateway uses two of them from sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and list.dsbl.org that are enabled by default. A third service from bl.spamcop.net is not.

Bottom line? Emails that get through the Rules, get quarantined on your email server and after a while they dissolve If you use Spamphibian. So hop on over to Outspring.com and download a copy to try before you buy. If you don’t have a registration number the product will work for 30 days.