AppRiver from OpenText vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway

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.

It is very well suited for an organization that wants to protect inbound email and use just one product. It may be less appropriate for an organization that is small or has a limited IT support staff.

• 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!!

• Prevents SPAM attacks.
• Filters email based on content.
• Blocks phishing links.
• Blocks ransomware links/attacks.

• 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.

• The web interface can be difficult at times.

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

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.

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.

Without mentioning some of the other products by name, I can tell you that Symantec Messaging Gateway is one of the best.

• 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.

• It would be difficult to determine the exact ROI Symantec Messaging Gateway had on your overall business. However, I can assure you the downtime suffered due to inbound email threats has been reduced to nearly zero in our environment. If IT isn't chasing down ransomware/phishing issues and users aren't staring at a quarantined PC, life is good.
• There are no negative impacts on ROI that I can think of.