Appriver is great for small business with basic email security needs
September 13, 2019

Appriver is great for small business with basic email security needs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AppRiver

We use AppRiver as our email filter for inbound and outbound emails. We use smart hosting to make sure that our emails are clean as they are delivered to our recipients.

We also only allow email delivery from their approved list of email delivery servers and have that as a rule on our firewall to keep all other connections from the internet from hitting port 25.

We also use their email encryption service that is difficult to use and manage as it's on a per-user basis and not at the domain level which makes it more difficult to work with. Also, my recipients of encrypted emails have to log in to a separate service to make this work and it is difficult to convince people to click on any links to get to our encrypted messages.
  • They have a great service and support team.
  • They have great simplified tools to manage our email flow and delivery.
  • They are affordable and I feel like I get a good amount of service for what we are paying.
  • 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.
  • We were able to drop our email scanning software that was taking hours to clear the cache of emails daily. The reduction in delays on email scanning improved our efficiency as emails take seconds to minutes to get to where they are going not hours.
  • Encrypted email service (Cypher-Post) is difficult to use as well as our recipients do not like how difficult it is to use. The stub emails that contain links often get deleted because people are trained not to click on links in emails. This has caused substantial delays in people getting emails from us.
As Trend Micros WFBS is a whole suite I don't expect it to have the same capabilities and or performance as a dedicated service.
Scanning times are greatly reduced using a cloud-based service as I don't have to provide CPU and Ram to a VM to sit scanning emails or relegate my exchange server to this task as well as handling all the rest of what exchange does.

It has been so long since I have used WFBS that I am not really sure how great it is now or how bad it is either.
I would say they have great support for simple things, but once you have to dig deeper into issues that may be caused by things that are on their end the support gets thin and can be frustrating as they don't seem to have a second tier of support.

They don't have any info on DMARC or DKIM or when they will possibly be implementing it. Help with email delivery is super sparse unless you have their hosted exchange service. But when they are smart hosting they do not have much to add to why your email may not be getting where it was intended.

Do you think AppRiver from OpenText delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AppRiver from OpenText's feature set?

No

Did AppRiver from OpenText live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AppRiver from OpenText go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AppRiver from OpenText again?

No

I think AppRiver is suited for a small business looking for some basics for securing their email flow. Simple easy to use tools and the web GUI is great. The as-a-service feature is great as a small business doesn't have to set up or maintain scanning hardware or software on-premise. They also have a feature that caches emails if unable to be delivered, unfortunately, unlike other vendors they do not have an emergency inbox available online at this time.

I think larger businesses that need to ensure delivery of emails with DKIM and DMARC are going to find that this service is lacking and not able to handle some of the new norms of email security.

AppRiver from OpenText Feature Ratings

Anti-malware
5
Customizability
8
Threat Detection
5
End-to-End Encryption
2
Management Tools
7