Mailshell claims a high anti-spam performance and to test this we set the appliance up to filter live email for over a week. We asked the appliance to tag and forward any spam and on each client we created Outlook rules to move tagged messages to separate folders. At the end of the test we calculated a 97 per cent success rate with only fifteen false positives.
Commtouch was just as impressive and for testing we blocked the games and gambling categories. We checked out a range of online bingo and poker sites and called it a day after the UTM10 blocked us from the first 50 sites visited in each category.
The scourge of social networking was handled well as with this category blocked we were kept away from the likes of Facebook and Twitter. We often find these types of sites get dropped in different categories so were pleased to see a lookup tool provided where you can enter a URL and find out what category it comes under.
We were impressed with the ProSecure UTM10 during testing as it proved to be very easy to deploy and no pushover in the performance stakes. Small business that want a simple yet well featured plug and go security appliance should definitely take a closer look.
Verdict
With the ProSecure UTM10, Netgear is offering small businesses an affordable stepping stone into appliance based network security. It’s very easy to install, offers an impressive range of features and delivers good performance across the board.
Chassis: Desktop Memory: 512MB RAM; 2GB CompactFlash card Network: 5 x Gigabit (4 x LAN, 1 x WAN) Anti-virus: Sophos Anti-spam: Mailshell URL filtering: Commtouch Management: web browser
