Fortinet FortiMail Reviews

We are system integrators and we deploy it on our customer's sites for email security.

This solution has many good features. The number of false positives is minimal.

It is easy to use and integrates well with FortiSandbox.

It's very contextual, and the reporting is good.

There have been many improvements with the migration from 6.0.

I don't know if it is possible, but I would like to see Artificial Intelligence and machine learning introduced. It would allow for more detailed threat identification.

I have been using FortiMail for five years.

This is a very stable product and all of our customers are happy that we use it.

This solution is scalable.

We have 10 customers who have purchased it and we have two operators who work with the accounts.

From a technical aspect, we have no issues as we have two or three team members who are certified in this product.

Previously, we have not used any other products. We have heard of Cisco but have not worked with this product.

The initial setup is straightforward, not at all complex. It was very easy.

It is very intuitive and easy to deploy. 

Our in-house team deploys and maintains it.

Approximately five years ago the price was low. Now the price is a bit on the high side.

I understand it is because the product comes with a vendor license. One vendor can do many things.

The price is acceptable for the support license it includes.

I would encourage everyone to use this product. Many organizations that are concerned about security especially with email, need to deploy FortiMail.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for identifying spam, viruses, zero-day spamming, and any other kind of spam issues our organization might face.

We have several of these solutions in place. We do have, as of late, spam outbreaks. This solution has been pretty reliable in dealing with them. 

The solution can scale.

The solution is mostly stable.

Sometimes it takes a little bit too long to determine if an email is good or not. If they could shorten that time span, it'd be so much better. It does delay our email, which does not make users happy. That said, I would have to say we have not been blacklisted for quite a while now.

Sometimes there are false positives.

When spam goes into system quarantine, it would be ideal if there was a safe way to let the users review the email in question and release it themselves, as opposed to having to wait on an administrator, to search for it and release it. It could be done securely. I understand why the system quarantines. However, a lot of users have their financial documents or lawyer's documents get thrown into the system quarantine and they're waiting on them. They need them within the hour as they are often time-sensitive matters. Due to this, they have to contact me. They wait for a while because they don't know when it's going to come, however, eventually they have to contact me. It's a delay. People understandably get very impatient.

There are some emails that go through that should be given a login code - for example, like whenever you're signing up for Microsoft in the cloud and they have to send you a login code. These codes from well-known vendors get stuck in the spam outbreak. They get stuck in different places. 

Whitelisting should be a little bit friendlier for the users. It was actually easier a few versions back. Once you logged into your Fortimail account, you could whitelist very easily. Now, you have to kind of navigate through the email to do it. We cannot turn on the auto whitelist feature on because then there are users that will download anything without thinking, so we never use the auto whitelist feature. That's why it's so important to make whitelisting individually an easy task.

I've used the solution within the last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is mainly good. We do occasionally get false positives, however, it's rare.

It is very scalable and it does work well for what it's doing.

We've been satisfied with the technical support. They always are able to help us with upgrades and implementations. We find them to be quite knowledgeable.

For us, the setup is pretty straightforward. However, it's that way due to the fact that we use technical support to assist us. If we were to do it on our own, it may be difficult to implement. It's not something that I could just pull up and do on my own. I don't feel like I could. The knowledge of the engineers is very beneficial.

In our use case scenario, we do have support to help us set it up. In all the scenarios, even when I migrate to another upgrade or to a different box, even though we've had this for several years, we always use support.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. If it weren't for issues surrounding quarantining emails, I'd rate it higher.

The primary use case for this solution is for filtering emails, internally and for external emails. We have part with Office 365 and the other is hosted inside. We have monitoring and certain policies regarding emails, both in sending and receiving them. 

The deployment Model is on-premises using a virtual machine.

This a user-friendly solution.

Troubleshooting is very simple because you can see where the email was not delivered and why it would be considered as spam. For the IT team, it is important, because when they are asked by management why their email was not sent or why was this email that was sent to me was considered as spam, they have the details that are needed to explain why. 

It is much better than IronPort for Cisco and Websense. 

For now, as per our experience with FortiMail in handling a large number of emails and spams as well, in the past three years, we have been protected and saved from any attacks from the outside. This is one of the main reasons we will continue to use FortiMail.

The dashboard is small, it doesn't have a huge dashboard that you can rely on, you need another application to work with it, which is why they created FortiAnalyzer. This allows you to dig deeper if you want details. For example, it would tell you from which domain, to what domain, and what are the triggers that have been used to classify this email. These are all extra features, it is not an all in one.

Some of the dashboards found in the FortiAnalyzer could be improved. For the basics, the solution covers it. 

An additional feature that could be added is a pop-up screen notifying you that an email has been blocked, without having to double click on it to take you there it could provide you with a summary explaining why it was on hold or why was it spam when you hover over it with your cursor.

I have been using this solution for three years.

This solution is very stable. I don't remember the last time that I had to restart the server.

This is the main mail filter, for our entire company.

They are different, not of the same email. One for Office 365 and the other is Lotus and other mail services.

Not only one service in our system, but it is configured on that one main filter using different platforms, acting as the main suitor for FortiMail.

There are approximately five hundred users, with two administrators and three at the help desk. They can do minor duties such as releasing emails, but not going into why were the emails blocked. They help to release emails that are blocked for users, who cannot release them on their own. We do, however, have limited system privileges for the administrators.

The administrators maintain the solution. The administrators will search for new firmware, find the new releases, and whether it is beneficial or not needed.

This solution is scalable at the start. You don't have any boundaries for upgrading or downgrading.

The Virtual Machine can hold as much as you want, but of course, every Virtual Machine has its capacity. You cannot take the capacity that is needed now, but rather, you have to think forward. For example, maybe now you have twenty emails, but next year we're going to have fifty emails more, and you end up with seventy, so now you reach one hundred.

While every Virtual Machine has its limitations, the limitation of every Virtual Machine is large.

We do not plan to increase usage.

The technical support was good. They are perfect.

The support is open and support is with FortiGate. They always reply and they are always there to support you within an hour, at the maximum. 

Everything will be shown in your inbox. 

We develop our products, and we do our troubleshooting without relying on the support.

If we reach a stage where we can't do anything more, then we contact support. It has been approximately two years since we last contacted them.

Previously we used a different solution. We switched to FortiMail because our old solution was not good, or stable.

We used many solutions before, including Sophos Email, and when you have a good experience with a product you will not go back to the old products or switch to other products unless there are big advantages.

Emails were not accurate, some emails on the first day were in your inbox and another day, they are quarantined, and then other days they were not being delivered.

There were limitations in the configuration and troubleshooting. 

We have always had SLAs, but not with the company, it was with the brand. For example, we had support from Cisco and Sophos between one and three years.

We directly open cases with them. Two cases were not closed. I had completed my troubleshooting and solved the issue, while they were not able to solve it. 

Cisco was too complicated, not user-friendly, and not designed for emails in that complex environment. For an easier environment, they were fine, but, not for a complex environment, with different main servers, and different platforms.

Cisco is also more expensive than others. I don't know why, especially now, with technology in the hands of every brand.

Cisco is not the one and only, but now, it is the last and only.

This is why we are no longer using Cisco. We did have a good experience with Cisco. Everything was tested. I asked the suppliers, the brand owners in the region, to come over to see us. I didn't just go to Fortinet FortiMail directly.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment time varies depending on if you are doing research, or if you are going to post on your site regarding FortiMail. If it is one domain it will take one day, or if it is for ten domains that have to be checked on to see the main flow and to see everything, it can take anywhere from one to three days.

We had only one staff member for the deployment of this solution.

To have it fully deployed and for fine-tuning, it will need ten working days. At some points, there is mail that you receive and not able to detect them, for example, all of the mail you are getting are spam or are getting quarantined or they are not quarantined, they are just trespassing in, you need approximately ten days. It's similar to machine learning, where you can learn your emails and how they flow. 

Simply put, the implementation is one to three days and for fine-tuning, it is ten days.

We used the reseller and the technical people to work with us, but the configurations and the policies are from my recommendation.

The resellers are awesome!

The time needed for troubleshooting before was reduced by at least 80%. This allowed us to focus on other applications as well, not only the web filter, email filter, and applications for the firewall. 

We have taken away some applications that we used to monitor our network with, as they were offered in FortiGate, so we no longer needed them.

Many areas helped us in reduced costs, not only in the administration in these areas, but in replacing other services that we used to buy. For example, If you want to have wireless access points so that people can access on their mobiles, we would have had to purchase a radio-server and an expensive wireless access point which was needed together. 

Access points that would cost between sixty and eighty dollars, you can have them with FortiGate on a switch, allowing you to monitor all of these from the FortiGate. 

You have all of the security, you can create your policies and you can do all the measurement and shaping and applications of vision monitoring. Everything can be done through FortiGate.

These are some of the advantages that FortiGate have over all the others. 

It's multi-platform. 

As long as you work more on the configuration and you dig deep inside the policies, you can reach huge worlds, and the security layers, not seven, layer eight and nine because intelligence and security are there. 

You have all it backs-up with the company. So yes, several things have been changed and replaced.

We are satisfied with the pricing of this solution.

Licenses are based on everyone's needs. If you don't need the full bundle that includes everything, you have options for the small or medium enterprise environments.

I was doing both the evaluating and testing. 

I had researched the internet for the leaders.

I did not go with Gartner as they pay to gain leadership. I went to other sources. I went to reviews, and I opened cases in everyone. I evaluated Barracuda, IronPort Cisco, Sophos, FortiMail and Websense.

I evaluated every one of the five brands and it took five months of testing all brands before we made the decision to go with FortiMail. We chose FortiMail because they passed all of the tests. The POC was for one month.

Emails are dangerous to deal with. You need backdoors for all people, You don't have any control over it because you are not the person who's dealing with emails for the employees.

Everyone is dealing with their own emails. In order to secure your emails, you need to secure your employees and the emails that are trespassing into your environment.

You need to find a solution that not only scans emails, but you also need to have some artificial intelligence for the machine learning for emails.

That's what FortiMail is doing. 

FortiMail is flexible, straightforward, and easy to troubleshoot. This is key, for  IT, they need to troubleshoot easily, and need to know why and how this was done. 

FortiMail is one of the important applications that can provide us what we require, as well as, being able to delegate your troubleshooting and your administration with many players or many, team members in IT. There are some that can do it while others cannot.

You should test before you decide to own a product. Don't rely on people saying, that it's the best product I have. You should know what your business is working with. There are no best practices in IT. There is what the business needs in IT.

The best practices that are there, are by the books, but the business may require different paths than the books and the best practices they tell you. So, always test. Know why and what you need the services for and don't buy everything, because you will not have time to be working on all of them.

If you have things set up straightforwardly, and it is fast to configure, then, yes, these products are good for you. The differences are, the experience and stability of these products, and how far you can go with the policies. This is what I have learned, not only from FortiMail but from all the solutions we're working with.

Never put your business and IT aside. They should collaborate and align together.

Overall, this is a good and reliable application.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have implemented this solution in our VMware environment to host our own mail domain. So when the mails come in, we use the security profile and all the features of the FortiMail very efficiently - all the blacklists, safe lists, block lists, and other securities that are there to change and contain. We use spamming and content filtering and attachment filtering. 

The solution provides different tools and reporting so now one can prevent malicious spam coming through. You can put that on the blacklist, white list or accordingly. Based on the IP repetition score, there are so many things the developers have improved which weren't available in the earlier versions. there. Now the filtering is really effective to protect any mail environment of any company. 

I think the spamming feature is very valuable. One of the features of FortiMail is the sandbox. If any suspicious or malicious thing is detected, it uploads to the FortiMail, and then to the database, and then it's checked. Once it's confirmed that the mail is good content, then it's moved inside and forwarded to its destination. So the sandboxing is a really valuable feature. 

FortiMail is currently available in the appliance mode so I believe the technology can be improved a little. There are a lot of viruses and malicious things out there that can damage your environment. So I think they need to be analytical in their quiet mode implementation so that these things get updated constantly. If anything new is in the market, it should be blocked by the FortiMail immediately.

It is a very stable solution. We rarely get any complaint from the users getting spam. Even my own finance head and managing directors are satisfied. 

I will not give good marks on their support team. The support is not good at all. If you call in with an emergency thing, they will send you some PDF to read rather than sending it to their technical team. We therefore use our own expertise team who then uses Google to search for a solution. Online support sometimes takes up to a week to get back to you. 

We used Trend Micro Gateway and another McAfee gateway, but Fortinet is a good product. We were using McAfee, the email gateway security filtering, anti-spam filtering. 

The filtering is really effective to protect any mail environment of any company. I can definitely recommend this solution and my rating is a nine out of ten.

We have the FortiMail appliance, and it is installed on-premises. It provides email filtering for our Exchange 2013 server.

These days, the threats by email are very high, and this solution provides our security. I would say that eighty percent of threats are known, and there is another twenty percent that is new. New threats are added to the database as they are discovered.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the spam filter.

The only drawback to this solution is that the firmware is frequently updated, and each update results in downtime. Because of this, sometimes we skip the firmware updates so that we don't have to work outside of office hours.

The reporting capability could be improved.

It would be helpful to have a tracking feature to help us with investigating where a particular email came from.

This is a stable solution. 

We don't have a big organization, but it has been flexible enough for us. 

We have approximately one hundred email addresses being filtered. We have perhaps seventy-five people, but some have multiple email accounts, and there are additional mailboxes for the business, as well.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

The initial setup for this solution is straightforward.

We update the firmware on the appliance ourselves, and the latest update was just last week.

This is a good solution and value for the money.

This is a dynamic product that is continuously being improved. 

As we are moving to Office 365, we may be moving away from this solution. We may look for a cloud-based solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for messaging.

We have used the solution as a mandatory tool in our infrastructure. It's kept some of the spam email and stuff like that out. As a security layer, we've have added Fortimail for security as the mail gateway. 

FortiMail sometimes catches emails and marks them as spam. We sometimes need to contact the vendor regarding some issues. Occasionally, there's a bug that forces an upgrade, and once the upgrade goes through, it's fixed. 

There are features that other solutions have that this one is lacking, such as reporting options. I hope in future releases they advance their features list.

The load balance of the LTM and the WAF should be improved. I would like all of the features to be advanced in the future because it offers fewer security features than its competitors. They do support WAF and they do offer WAF and LTM but with fewer features compared with other brands like F5.

We were planning to replace F5 with Fortinet, but security came to us and said there are a lot of features that are not available. At that time, we changed our minds about utilizing the solution because of this. 

The solution is stable. We had issues around a firewall coming down as we worked towards finalizing an RFP of the license on the appliances. The vendor came directly to us and fixed the issue. They gave us a replacement for free to cover us until we got all of our projects renewed and replaced the firewall.

The scalability of the solution is good. We have more than 1,500 users. 

Technical support is great. They are able to look at their patches and offer quick responses. We even have an account manager in the Middle East. They are very good.

The initial setup was handled by a vendor partner. We were just monitoring or administrating the appliances.

We have vendor partners to help us with the implementation of the solution. I wouldn't recommend anyone attempting to implement the solution by themselves.

The pricing is good in comparison to the competition and the quality of the solution is very good.

We are using the on-premises deployment model. We're moving to virtual appliances soon. We are going to the government cloud, but all network appliances will be virtualized beforehand. Once we go on the cloud, everything will be hosted as assets.

I highly recommend the product. The product is easy and there's no complexity. It's easy to use, easy to learn, easy to upgrade, easy to apply any changes. It offers a good price versus quality balance.

I would rate the solution 8.5 out of ten.

The primary use of the solution is for email protection and protection against spam.

The anti-spam and anti-virus features are the most valuable.

It would be nice if we could manage the solution from the cloud so I could handle things off-site if necessary.

The solution is 100% stable.

The solution is very scalable. It can handle a lot of emails. We have about 2000 users here in Ghana.

Technical support is great. They're available 24/7 and their response time is typically within the hour.

I didn't previously use a different solution. My engineers may have used Barracuda in the past.

The initial setup of FortiMail is a little complex, but this is normal because it is a newer solution. It took about three days to deploy it. You only need about two people for deployment and maintenance.

I am an integrator; I handle the implementations myself.

It is one of the best solutions on the market. I would highly recommend them.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is to protect data from our customers and from our internal network. We now have a substitute for the Palo Alto Network and nowadays we also use FortiGate.

I like the possibility of getting reports offered by this solution, which is better than what Palo Alto offered. It is a very reliable program and it works great.

In the future, I would like it if there's a possibility to lower the price of the bandwidth and UTM. It is quite expensive.

The solution is very reliable and very stable. It has never been down or unresponsive. It's perfect.

We currently have about 3,000 users on Fortinet, mostly customers. The solution is scalable.

There was no need for us to use technical support so far.

We've also worked on the Palo Alto Network and FortiGate.

There are additional costs to the license fees. The solution is rather expensive.

I will definitely recommend this solution to others, and my rating is nine out of ten. It is very reliable and always available. In the future, I would like to see better management of the monitoring dashboard. Perhaps they can add a pie chart or other charts in the report because they are very useful and customers will really appreciate them.