Although protecting from spam at the desktop may be appropriate for the home user who directly collects mail from an ISP POP3 account, it is seldom the preferable option for the organization.
Desktop Spam Protection Negatives
High cost
Spam protection for an organization with 100 employees
Email client (Outlook) protection = $29.95 x 100 = $2,995 Total cost
Extensible Messaging Platform Server-based protection (250 user license) = $1,795 Total cost
Deploying at the server level produces a savings of $1,200
No centralized control
Impossible to implement organization-wide email content policies
Each individual employee determines what is spam
This option permits Joe to choose to receive pornography that will offend other employees
Each employee wastes time tuning their individual spam filters
Content based custom routing unavailable
White listing if available at all, is limited to the sender's email address, which is easily forged by spammers having even minimal skill.
Difficult to manage updates
Periodic spam signature distributions (if offered) are difficult to distribute consistently to every employee desktop
Roll-out of new releases is significant headache
Bottom line: When looking to protect your organization against spam, deploying a server-based content scanning solution is the preferred choice. Extensible Messaging Platform is a best-of-breed email content scanning solution which will protect your organization from pornography, marketing scams and other objectionable content while providing offordable cost, centralized management and ease of update.
Extensible Messaging Platform ( EMP 6 ), will stop Exchange spam, phishing attacks and email borne viruses before they reach Exchange Server or the organization's employees and customers.