Clearswift SECURE Email Gateway (SEG) vs. AppRiver from OpenText

The CS SEG appliances are running as virtual appliances by now. They do need not much power in the ESX environment. I recommend to use at least two peers running in a cluster. The cluster feature is working very well. The CS SEG can process a huge number of emails in a very short time frame.

Incentivized

AppRiver is great for both small and large organizations. Small businesses are unlikely to have much if any technical support staff available to them, for which AppRiver would be a great help. Likewise for large companies, having AppRiver can save your tech support team from dealing with basic, common, and repetitive application support, and allowing them to better focus on more important tasks at hand.

Incentivized

• CS SEG is fast in email processing
• Managing the quarantine is easy
• Display of the reasons why an email has been processed this is very detailed

Incentivized

• Very useful daily quarantine list emailed to users.
• Suspicious emails can be viewed online in their sandbox to check validity before releasing from quarantine.
• Multiple ways to filter emails (domain, email address, text, etc)
• Link protection is one of the newest options available and we absolutely love it!!

Incentivized

• Improvement is needed in the area of AV/Antispam update processing (internally)
• Improvement is needed in the log file processing. Many log file entries are not understandable for an operator or administrator without special insider knowledge
• Clearswift has recently changed the support provider. Now there are no german supporters anymore.

Incentivized

• They do not support DMARC and DKIM at this time and I don't know when or if they ever will.
• Their SPF record is not great and can possibly cause issues, at least that is what my support company has told me.
• Scanning of links in emails seems super limited and or non-existent. THings get through with completely bad malicious all the time and I assume they are not scanning them or they don't have a proper AV on their end.
• Once a domain is whitelisted any bad emails that may be spoofing that email domain are let through and no other filters apply to the emails. It's frustrating to have to white list 20+ individual email addresses from a company and not be able to white list just the domain and not feel secure doing that.

Incentivized

AppRiver is very easy to use. A new employee can begin using it on their first day.

Incentivized

AppRiver's live support is above what I expected, and I use it exclusively. I always get a professional, courteous, and knowledgeable tech that is easy to understand within a few minutes of placing a call. If you do have to leave a message they have always promptly returned my call.

Incentivized

The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway (CS SEG) has very low license costs. A two peer cluster is enough to run a complete emailing gateway environment. Compared to the Proofpoint PPS the CS SEG does not need a management appliance. The CS SEG peers can manage the quarantine by themselves. This is easy to use and quite fast.

Incentivized

AppRiver requires the least amount of management time, the pricing is better and the minimums are such that almost all SMB's won't be buying shelfware. If you are an MSP, become a partner and you will see spam problems become a thing of the past.

Incentivized

• Since this CS SEG environment is operated for a customer, I cannot answer this question

Incentivized

• Efficiency, teams adapt quickly to changes or new business needs.
• Support gives us alternatives on how to establish new timings for new business lines on email.
• An increase in profit owing to a reduction in the amount of assistance our in-house IT staff is required to provide.

Incentivized