Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade Reviews

The primary use case is to protect the organization from any attacks generated via email. As most of the attacks in recent days are via email, the organization has to be equipped and ready to mitigate this type of attack at the perimeter level, before it has been delivered to the user's mailbox or an endpoint.

Basic anti-spam filters are not capable of protecting against the latest generation of attacks. Therefore, for protecting the organization against this sophisticated or targeted attack, we concluded that the next generation of email security solutions is a must. Ultimately, it should be able to protect against any attack that is sent via email. 

At first, it seemed like a good solution but it wasn't; we have the mail server on site.

After six months, the mail was in fits and starts and the Check Point infrastructure was not responding properly. We realized that we were under a strong spam attack and had to install another antispam product. We were lucky enough to be supported by the Check Point team of specialists, who helped us to identify and solve the problem.

In fact, even with analyzing the logs, it was not something that was evident at first sight

This product integrates well and is easy to manage.

It is certainly very beneficial for a small business and works best in combination with other Check Point blades, such as the Data Protection Blade that protects against data loss via email.

It is useful for having alerts on the e-mail traffic trends. 

This solution is ideal for a small business or if you have a mail server in the cloud and most of the spam is blocked by the provider. It is not good for large email flows. If you require or move to large mail flows, the solution needs to be changed. 

Determining areas for improvement is not a question that can be answered simply. 

We should separate the antispam engine into two parts; the first that breaks down mass spam, and the second for refinement.

It would be good to dedicate a separate core, at least for the first phase, so that it does not take away resources from the system. The ideal approach would be to enrich the product with more functions, however, this would likely also lead to an increase in cost.

It would be useful to have more logs and in aggregate mode, perhaps through a specific report, that can be more easily used for troubleshooting. 

I've used the solution for three months.

The primary use case is to protect the organization from any attack generated via email. As most of the attacks in recent days are via email, the organization has to be equipped and ready to mitigate this type of attack at the perimeter level, before it has been delivered to the user mailbox or endpoint.

Basic anti-spam filters are not capable of protecting against the latest generation of attacks. So, for protecting the organization against this sophisticated or targeted attack, we concluded that the next generation of Email Security solutions is a must. Ultimately, it should be able to protect against any attack that is sent via email.

This product prevents sophisticated attacks, such as:

• Phishing Email attacks such as impersonation, spear-phishing, and business email compromise
• Account Takeover protection, where the primary aim of an attacker is to steal user credentials
• Protection against malicious files, malicious attachments, and malware. The primary aim of this kind of email is to infect user machines and steal data, or injecting malicious code on a machine so that they can move laterally and infect other machines within the organization, or perform a ransomware attack 
  
• Protection against data leakage that can be caused by an aforementioned attack, which can result in financial loss or reputation damage to the organization 
  

This solution is hosted in an inline mode for the protection of inbound, outbound, and internal email communication. It does not require any change in MX entry on the DNS Server for routing traffic to the service provider for Email Security.

The complete solution can be hosted on-premises for environments where the organization has an on-premises email solution, and it will remain invisible to the attacker.

This solution can be integrated with SandBlast Technology provided by Check Point and its most effective solution is breach prevention. 

It can be extended to the cloud as well, for protecting cloud-hosted email.

The solution can be monitored on a single dashboard with actionable insights and reporting.

Our solution required multiple appliances, as a single appliance only supports up to 5,000 files. This means that depending upon the number of files that need to be processed, the number of appliances needs to be increased. Essentially, the number of appliances needs to be sized accordingly for complete protection. The increase in the number of appliances makes it difficult to manage in terms of physical connectivity and configuration.

The product performs only basic anti-spam capabilities, compared to CloudGuard SaaS, which provides more robust anti-spamming functionality than the on-premises solution. 

YARA rules can be added only using the CLI, rather than through the GUI, which makes it difficult for the administrator.

We are not using the Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade at this moment. 

This solution is stable.

This product is easily scalable and a number of devices can be added whenever it is required.

The support and our experience with the OEM were excellent.

Previously, we were using the email gateway along with an additional license to protect against email attacks on the same gateway.

Setting up the product is complex. In the case of a single appliance, it is simple. However, it becomes complex with several appliances.

The solution was implemented with our in-house team along with the OEM.

The setup is complex, as it is dependent on the number of files that need to be processed via the email security appliance.

The cost is competitive with other security products on the market. 

We evaluated similar solutions by Cisco & Trend Micro.

This solution should be designed to support all functionality, including use as an email gateway in case the functionality is required, as well as having a strong anti-spam module 

Our company works in the area of developing and delivering online gambling platforms. The Check Point Next-Generation Firewalls are the core security solution we use for the protection of our DataCenter environment, located in Asia (Taiwan).

The environment has about 50 physical servers as virtualization hosts, and we have two HA Clusters that consist of 2x5400 hardware appliances, managed by an OpenServer Security Management Server on a Virtual Machine (KVM), all running on R80.10 with the latest JumboHotfix.

The Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade is one of the numerous blades activated on the NGFWs and serves for security improvement in the area of email filtration and anti-spam protection.

We rely on the Check Point HA Clusters to secure the DataCenter of our company that is located in Asia (Taiwan). This software blade - Check Point Anti-Spam & Email Security - is enabled among the number of the others, and is responsible for scanning and blocking the potential malware email or the email that contain Spam messages. 

As the security administrator, I see that the Check Point Anti-Spam & Email Security works quite well. The logs and reports show the daily number of messages blocked, and it's amazing. 

From time to time, I manually check the blocked emails and can confirm that 99% of them are trash. I am confident that the number of False Positives is minimal for this solution.

1. I like the flexible configuration set, e.g. both the content-based and the IP reputation anti-spam are supported, but you may choose to disable the mechanism you don't like.
2. The databases of IPs and text strings are updated as per schedule, which can be adjusted in the blade options.
3. It is possible to create and use the custom block list for the anti-spam blade in the policy, which we have configured.
   
4. When you have the IPS software blade purchased and activated, the emails are checked by the email IPS protections, thus increasing the security level even more.

I think that the pricing for the Check Point products should be reconsidered, as we found it to be quite expensive to purchase and to maintain. Maintenance requires that the licenses and the support services be prolonged regularly.

Alternatively, they should create some additional bundles of the software blades with significant discounts in addition to the current Next Generation Threat Prevention & SandBlast (NGTX) and Next Generation Threat Prevention (NGTP) offers.

We have also had several support cases opened for software issues, but none of them were connected with the Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade.

We have been using this product for about three years, starting in late 2017.

The Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade is stable.

The Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade scales well with the gateways we use, since it doesn't affect the overall performance much after activation.

We have had several support cases opened, but none of them were connected with the Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade. Some of the issues were resolved by installing the latest recommended JumoHotfix, whereas some required additional configuration at the OS kernel level.

The longest issue took about one month to be resolved, which we consider too long.

No, it's the first NGFW with email protection we onboarded.

The setup was straightforward. The configuration was easy and understandable, and we relied heavily on built-in objects and groups.

Our deployment was completed by our in-house team. We have a Check Point Certified engineer working in the engineering team.

Choosing the correct set of licenses is essential because, without the additional software blade licenses, the Check Point gateways are just a stateful firewall.

No, we decided to stick with Check Point after the demo.

Check Point makes up part of our security solution in all of our locations across India. We are in the eCommerce industry and one of the things that we do is set up tickets for moviegoers.

We have categorized our requirements as per the online penetration of our booking agents. As an example, in one of our locations, we have a penetration of filling online tickets that is reaching up to 85%. It is important that this system is safeguarded to ensure that we are not exploited on the ticketing platform using the OCR codes that we are generating and sending to our customers. As the tickets are emailed to the patrons in advance of the show, it is important that this email is secure. This is one of our use cases.

Using Check Point has helped us to safeguard our environment and help to protect against spam, as well as other types of attacks against our network. We are a PCI DSS compliant company in India and we need to ensure that our patrons' data is protected. At the same time, we want the convenience of being able to send tickets to them. Check Point has allowed us to do that.

The features that I like the best are message encryption and message validation.

The manageability using this console is complex and it should be a little more user-friendly. If you don't have a good understanding of putting the policies in place then sometimes it is tough to manage from the console. A more intuitive GUI would make it easier to manage.

The user should be able to perform a real-time search of the objects and see the messages. As it is now, when we create an object, sometimes you find out at a later stage that the object already exists. If I could simply type an object into the search bar and find out whether it exists by seeing it in a dropdown then it would save me time.

We have been using the Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Blade for two years.

This solution has been stable and is working very well in our environment.

This is a scalable solution. We have 170 locations across India and all of them have Check Point installed. We had considered scalability from the beginning of this project, with a three to five-year plan. 

We have been in direct contact with technical support and our experience has been that they are both nice and helpful. After the deployment was completed, the partner who assisted us had moved out and completed a knowledge transfer to the entire team. There was a subsequent issue that had to do with the VPN, and the Check Point technical support was very helpful in resolving it.

We have used other security products by vendors such as Juniper and Palo Alto, but not for the same use cases.

We began our implementation about two and a half years ago and as part of the process, we divided India into different regions. In total, it took us about 120 days to fully deploy across all of our locations.

We have in-house staff who are very well versed in the Check Point technology, however, given the volume of deployment, we contracted a partner that was recommended by the vendor.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is that it is a robust and reliable platform. With respect to messaging and firewall products, all of them are pretty good but it depends on your scenario. I would say that Check Point has the best security, the messaging protocols are pretty good, and the reliability is higher than competing products by Palo Alto and Juniper. When adopting Check Point, your skill is one of the key points to consider.

This is a good solution but there are certain complexities that need to be made more user-friendly. It should be more manageable from an IT perspective. This includes things such as setting up specific policies. A more intuitive GUI, for example, would help.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is improving our company's security posture.

We now have better security and fewer false positive and less stress .

The antivirus is easy to use and fast with a good signature database that is updated in real-time.

Installation time could be improved as it takes too long to install. With the software footprint, it should be taking less than the time it took to install. In the future, I hope to see faster installation and easier installation on our platform as time is equal to money.

I've used the solution for three months.

I did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup was good.

The product offers a good price.

I did not evaluate a different solution. 

Like any company, we needed an antispam product so we implemented this solution.

Buying this blade was convenient from an economic point of view and we took advantage of it to have a product that is both well-integrated and easy to manage.

At first, it seemed like a good solution but it wasn't; we have the mail server on site.

After six months, the mail was in fits and starts and the Check Point infrastructure was not responding properly. We realized that we were under a strong spam attack and had to install another antispam product. We were lucky enough to be supported by the Check Point team of specialists, who helped us to identify and solve the problem.

In fact, analyzing the logs was not something that was evident at first sight. 

This product integrates well and is easy to manage.

It is certainly very beneficial for a small business and works best in combination with other Check Point blades, such as the Data Protection Blade that protects against data loss via email.

It is useful for having alerts on the e-mail traffic trend.

Determining areas for improvement is not a question that can be answered simply. I think we should separate the antispam engine into two parts; the first that breaks down mass spam, and the second for refinement.

It would be good to dedicate a separate core at least for the first phase so that it does not take away resources from the system. The ideal approach would be to enrich the product with more functions but this I imagine would also lead to an increase in cost.

It would be useful to have more logs and in aggregate mode, perhaps through a specific report, that can be more easily used for troubleshooting.

We have been using the Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade for six months.

For small mail flows, this product is stable.

This solution is ideal for a small business or if you have a mail server in the cloud and most of the spam is blocked by the provider. It is not good for large email flows. If you require or move to large mail flows, the solution needs to be changed.

Third-party customer service was excellent and the technical team is highly skilled.

Previously, there was no specific solution and we relied on the local antispam engine installed on the clients.

The initial setup is simple and it takes just a few steps.

Our ROI is in line with the investment.

This is a simple system with a very low cost and basic functions, which surely is ideal for a small company. 

We tried Apache SpamAssassin but it was difficult to integrate it into our environment.

Unfortunately, the product has not proved up to par. Every component has to do its job; it is an excellent advanced firewall solution and we cannot expect it to do everything but the Spam and Email Blade must do its job well as Check Point does.

Mail sanitisation features are second to none.

• Without this product, we would get 100,000 pieces of spam daily.
• With it, we have greater system performance.

The UX/UI could be more friendly.

10 years.

No.

No.

Outside of official channels, we could not find a lot of sources of technical material. However, the tech support and documentation provided were adequate.

Yes, I previously used a GFI solution. I switched because the GFI solution worked with the Microsoft ISA firewalls and I moved to a different platform.

It was relatively straightforward.

Yes, I looked at a few others. This had a higher spam removal percentage.

Spam percentage of more than 98%. It is one of the best products that I have used.