Mimecast - End User's Dream for Spam and Malware
December 17, 2018

Mimecast - End User's Dream for Spam and Malware

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

Overall Satisfaction with Mimecast Secure Email Gateway

Mimecast is used by our entire organization for our business continuity plan as well as our production email security. We added the email threat management package to our original subscription in 2017. We license each user and use it in conjunction with high availability Exchange on prem and SMSMSE for antivirus.
  • Mimecast is fantastic as a spam blocker. Our users get the traditional noon day email with their "held" items for release at their discretion, but we have a small rate of failure for recognizing true spam vs. true emails.
  • It is extremely easy for the users to use, especially with the Outlook ribbon feature enabled so that they can access their held (spam) emails, allowed senders list (white list), blocked senders list (blacklist) and other features quickly.
  • We have experienced a few outages or maintenance windows internally for our on prem email system, but we have not had Mimecast unavailable for us once. It's been 100% reliable.
  • The Admin Management console is absurdly complicated. For every first time we wanted to setup we've had to call their support for assistance. Support is quick and fantastic but it's so difficult to do anything yourself. They seem to have gone out of their way to call features unique things instead of using standard language from other providers so you as an IT professional know what you're looking for to setup.
  • They have lots of KB articles, which their support will point you to. They are written on the most basic level and don't actually provide the help you need. For example, the KB page will tell you the list of options on the page... but not actually tell you what you do, why you might use them, or define their terminology.
  • Their email threat management system has several nice features. One of the features available is that it will rewrite links in emails so that users click the link and it sandboxes the link, testing it on their server space and the user sees it there. This means the actual link in the email gets changed to the address of one of their servers. As a law firm, the EXACT LINKS are important to maintain in our communications and editing actual data from our clients to point to a Mimecast server is an unacceptable practice. I wish they had an alternative that did not edit the link itself on the page.
  • The thousands of spam or malicious emails a day it catches, deletes or rejects for us has saved us a lot of inbox time over our previous two vendors. That ROI alone has made the software worth it.
  • The fact that it can double as our Business Continuity plan for email communications is also added value to the product for us.
We used Symantec (previously Dell's) Email Security Cloud. The features were listed as similar to Mimecast, but support was a thousand times slower and we had significantly more spam, even after all the setting adjustments we could make. We also experienced several issues in with the sync application and needed to resync manually on occasion (for user accounts). Prior to that we used on prem Barracuda load balancers. They worked about as well as Mimecast for spam blocking, but setting up the Baysian databases so that it could begin learn what the users considered spam took ages. It of course did not the Business Continuity feature. Mimecast is so much better than anything else we tried. From a user point of view, it is rock solid, easy to use, simple to understand, has an easy iPhone app, provides PIN and 2FA for security - what else could an end user want?
For companies with larger IT departments, especially someone Exchange savvy, Mimecast is a great tool that works terrific after you set it up. Administering and managing it is easy once it's up. The initial setup of any rules or functionality is overly complicated and takes great patience and lots of support time to accomplish what you want. The ability to use the Mimecast app or website during our onsite Exchange maintenance periods is terrific and it works great for business continuity.