Fortinet FortiMail Reviews

I'm not working on the local FortiMail installation and really concentrate on servicing and deploying FortiMail to clients. The primary uses depending on the client are anti-spam and anti-fishing as well as threat isolation.

This product has improved our organization by giving us another opportunity to sell a top product to our clients that will do what it was designed to do.

Personally, I believe that FortiMail is a very good antispam solution. Clients use this solution as well for anti-spam and anti-phishing.

I believe the product needs better integration with FortiSandbox and integration with third-party Sandbox solutions.

What clients would like, I think, is more features on the appliances. Processing power is very important and this is dependent on abilities to upgrade the appliance.

The clients seem to always like the stability of the product. They always like the way it functions, the support knowledge we provide when necessary and that they really have to do nothing to keep the product functioning.

The product is definitely a scalable solution. For example, we have a customer — a very technical customer who recently expanded operations — and we managed to expand the solution to fit their new needs on request.

It is a very good solution compared to the competition due to the capacity of the appliance and the number or volume of emails it can handle. It is almost independent of the number of users. That's why it has a very good competitive advantage.

We have a good support team to contact at Fortinet if we need them. They are available and reliable.

I believe that the complexity of the initial setup depends on the customer's environment and their need. This can increase or decrease the complexity of deployment. Generally, it takes between 10 to 20 working days to fully deploy. And then we require only occasional support for maintenance, again depending on the case.

We are Fortinet partners and act as consultants while also doing installations and maintenance.

According to clients, there is a return on investment in the cost of ownership and value. That is it ends up costing most clients less than other solutions while providing as much in features and services or more.

There are subscription fees but I don't think there is an additional cost. The pricing is not my area of expertise, but clients seem to suggest the license cost is competitive. It depends on capacity and not the number of users.

My title at our company is Presale Security Solutions Manager for service security. I service presale and consulting for FortiGate and other mail gateway solutions. Fortinet is one of our top products in this sector. I'm often selling different Fortinet solutions like FortiGate, FortiMail, and FortiSandbox as well. Sometimes we will consider other products but this is our main line.

With the Fortinet FortiMail solution, you have a lot of advantages because of the effectiveness of security. You also see a return on investment in the cost of ownership and value. The licensing value — as I hear from clients — is very good, and the capacity of FortiMail is very scalable. You can have a large number of users and pay according to the capacity, not on the number of users so you pay for actual use. 

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and 10 is the best, I give FortiMail an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is as a secure email gateway. I just use the blocking feature and spam detection.

The product minimizes the spam email and inspects suspicious or isolates infected email attachments. It detects phishing emails also because of the sandbox integration (FortiSandbox).

One of the features I like the best and find most valuable is the gray list feature. You can mark a trusted domain to reduce interruptions and other domains you are not sure that you can trust you put in a gray list. The mechanism of this feature can greatly decrease the number of spam emails and helps determine which are under more scrutiny, but it is also not a total block. You can put domains as blacklisted which just blocks delivery. This mechanism and level of control are awesome in FortiMail.

I think that it is possible to improve the encryption features in FortiMail. I tried to use the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) features which mainly has to do with encrypted traffic. They are using a particular protocol. If you want to use encryption differently you can't exchange the private keys. So you need to use the IDE feature. The drawback is that the IDE feature in FortiMail is very difficult to deploy. It would be good if they made this easier to use.

The main thing that we choose the Fortinet product for is that protects us and because it is mostly very easy to use. Also, the graphic user interface is easy to work with and very clearly maps out what we need to see in administration. The IDE feature in Fortinet is not as good as the rest of the product because it's very difficult to deploy it.

The stability of this solution is very good. We do not have trouble with downtime or other failures.

The scalability of this product is very good. I mean, there may be a good competition that is better in this way, but I think it's a very strong product.

We are using actually 400 users. These 400 users have full feature access and can use the anti-spam, antivirus, and anti-phishing features. It would not be hard to add more users.

The support from the company is very good when we have to use it — may be to solve an issue more quickly. As an elite partner, we have full privilege in FortiMail support and with the Fortinet tech center. We don't need full privilege for the clients on cloud deployment. 

Certain things we can not do. You can't turn off this mode only the tech guys can do that. There are also some features you can't deploy on FortiMail. For example, SNMP or load management. You can't deploy these features by yourself and you need to ask the support center to add this feature.

Before using Fortinet FortiMail, I was using the Symantec product for anti-spam. It was not the full anti-spam product and it was not very good at what I hoped it would do. In the version I had, they give you a partial feature and not a feature limitation. I looked at other alternatives and think FortiMail is a better solution.

The FortiMail deployment takes about two weeks. It depends on what needs to be configured and the size of the system. We only need three admins with one as the super admin and two as partial admins.

Every day we are using the system to monitor the emails. Every day we check our system and the quarantines. You should check the graylist domains. As you know the FortiMail depend on customer behavior. By your behavior or your incoming email's behavior, you can tune and fix policies with your environment. You have to take the time to do it.

I do installations by myself. We are an elite partner with Fortinet and do implementations and most customer support for our clients.

This may not exactly be what you mean by return on investment as far as the survey, but the product is a very good investment for time-saving and functionality. It works and it does its job well. A lot of people invest with this vendor and that shows it is a trusted product.

As far as licensing, we just have to buy the license and then do the renewal which is just like purchasing the first license. There are different choices for subscriptions.

We did also evaluate other solutions. Probably the strongest competition was FireEye Email Security. We didn't choose it because it's a very new product, and they didn't have much experience or recognition in the market. We decide to use a more well-known product to save us the trouble of working with a product that was not as well-tested.

I recommend this solution to clients and I really love the way that Fortinet thinks about and executes most of their solutions. They maintain a simple graphic user interface and they give you a good view of your network and good visibility.

I love the design of FortiGate. They know the protocol, how the protocol is being used and they protect the protocol from other mechanisms. FortiMail is an awesome product mechanically.

I think they should have better features in FortiMail to integrate more tightly with Fortinet. It should also have a user awareness mechanism or more artificial intelligence. It is a user environment that should help the user to know how efficiently email is transacting in the system as well as what are the latest forms of phishing, spam and malicious emails. They should definitely involve an AI mechanism in the latest version to be more proactive and intelligently determine solutions without administrative interaction.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate FortiMail as a nine. With artificial intelligence, it could be a ten.

We use the on-prem deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case of this solution is our main gateway and main server.

The most valuable aspects of this solution are that it protects us from spam and phishing attacks. We had a lot of attacks coming in and then we deployed this solution and they stopped. We no longer have any spam or phishing issues. 

The deployment modules need improvement. They insist that it should be deployed on two different versions which doesn't make sense because ultimately, it's just an IP address. But we tried and maneuvered our way around it. The biggest room for improvement would be the deployment. It will be hard for someone who doesn't understand the interface to deploy. If you understand it, you can find your way around the problems. 

They should bundle the analytics in the next release of this solution. Now we need another solution like FortiAnalyzer. 

Stability is great. I would recommend it to anyone. 

I haven't really looked at scalability. It fits my environment and my needs. But I do know that the hardware has limits and constraints. Even their smallest box can only support 150 mailboxes which is ridiculous.

Right now, we have around 600 users using this solution. Everybody's email goes through it. We require three admins for maintenance. 

We don't have any plans to upgrade it. 

When I had a problem, I contacted their technical support and they were good. I love their support. Somebody was having issues with false positives. Some emails were being flagged as spam. Their support was able to resolve the issue within the hour. 

We were using Microsoft before this solution but there's a limit to what it could do and we needed more protection. 

When I read the online documentation, the setup seemed complex. I have a background with this solution so I deployed it in my own way and it worked. It was pretty straightforward for me. The deployment took me fifteen minutes. If you understand how the server works, it's easy. 

I deployed the solution myself. 

We have definitely seen ROI. My emails are safer. We don't have any more spam or phishing emails. The users are safe now. I don't have to worry about what emails my team is getting. It makes my life easier. 

The annual cost is $55,000. There is only the licensing and support cost but aside for that, there are no additional costs. 

I don't remember the name but we used a Linux-based solution. We also didn't want to use a cloud solution so we looked at Fortinet and it seemed easy to deploy so we went with it. 

It reduces the stress of keeping your environment safe. Security starts with the individual and it needs to be layered. Mail is the easiest way to hit up a company. Mail security is a must. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for its anti-spam properties. In order to protect our mail server in our data center from spams, we need an anti-spam program. 

The solution helps me to do internal routing and to configure interfaces. FortiMail works on the profile.

I would like it if the solution could be more affordable.

The solution is very, very stable. We've had only one problem with FortiMail in the past when our internal hard-disk broke down due to a bad sector on the disk. My colleague contacted FortiMail's technical team, and they replaced it for us. This was bad for us because our systems were down for three days. But up to now, that was our only issue with this solution.

We have about 300 users and we plan to increase our usage by opening new branches and new factories. So I believe the program is scalable. 

The technical team was very helpful. Our only issue was that, because we are in Egypt, Fortinet had to use their distributors in Egypt to fix our problem, and that is why it took three days to get the hard disk, install it and reconfigure it. Luckily our last configuration didn't take up much time, only about one hour, thanks to a backup of the last configuration that was available online. But if it has to be shipped from the distributors, it will take three days at least.

My company previously used a software but when using an anti-spam solution as a hardware, it's better than an application, because an application could be corrupted.

My company pays around 28.000 Egyptian Pounds per year for this program. It is rather expensive in my opinion.

We compared it to Sophos, but it is more for users that aren't IT experts. It is so easy that anyone can use it - even my young child can configure Sophos. But for Fortinet, you need an IT expert. This is why we chose Fortinet, and we found that it is a very good solution.

I've also been using Cisco and it's a very good firewall. It's an old program, but it's doing its job for me. I use it for deviant connections and for publishing my internal server to the internet. So the Cisco firewall is also doing its job very well.

I rate this program a ten out of ten, because it's configured right. The person who configured it actually knows what the real function of anti-spam is. It protects me from cryptography. I do see some connection delay from time to time, but I believe it is because of the Sandbox check. 

We are a solution integrator, and we have been selling this product to our customers. We have three years of experience with it.

This is primarily used for anti-spam, in front of Microsoft Office 365.

This solution is deployed in a public cloud environment.

This solution has protected us from email spam and from phishing.

The most valuable features of this solution are anti-spam, sender reputation, and antivirus.

This is a good multi-tenant solution.

The web console management interface could be improved.

The documentation can be improved.

The stability of this solution is ok. It is always up.

This solution is very scalable.

The companies using this solution have between one hundred and two hundred people. We do plan to increase our usage of this solution.

Technical support is very competent and quick to answer our questions.

Prior to this solution, we used products from Cisco and Trend Micro. We switched mainly because of the price. 

The initial setup of this solution is very easy.

The deployment took between two and three days.

We implement this solution for our clients and deploy it using our in-house team.

Maintenance of this solution is automatic.

We have seen ROI with this solution.

The licensing model for this solution is better because it is based on the box and not the number of users.

I was already familiar with many solutions, so we did not evaluate other options before choosing this one.

This solution contains all of the features that we need. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Spam detection from FortiGuard Antispam Service and FortiMail antispam techniques; session based and application based.
• Inbound and outbound inspection
• Supports multiple domains/subdomains
• Mail routing
• Block/safe list based on e-mail addresses, domains or IP addresses
• DNS black list scan
• Banned word and dictionary scan
• Image scanning
• PDF scanning
• Suspicious newsletter detection
• Greylisting
• Bidirectional email translation using Address Mapping to hide protected domains from the external networks
• Sender reputation to prevent overload from high volume spams, mails with invalid recipients or infected messages
• Access delivery and receive rules
• Content monitor and filtering
• Recipient-based and IP-based policies
• User/group query options
• Mail data migration from existing mail server to FortiMail (Serrver Mode)
• Resource profiles; disk space quota, user access to address books
• Built-in agenda
• NFS and iSCSI support
• RAID support
• SMTP authentication via LDAP, RADIUS, POP3, IMAP
• Per user inspection based on LDAP attributes
• Mail queue management
• Easy management using web GUI or CLI
• Logging and reporting
• High-Availability with quarantine and mail queue synchronization
• Fortinet FortiMail is an industry-leading, multi-layered messaging security tool based on price and performance.
• Scalable solution from SME to the largest ISP and carrier networks, delivers long term investment protection
• Real-time Update from FortiGuard; signature database updating from FDN
• Sandbox integration (optional)
• Flexible and easy deployment in three modes (gateway, server with fully e-mail server features, and transparent).
• End-to end IBE
• Advanced bi-directional filtering
• Multi-layer threat detection and protection
• Data Leak Prevention, Policy based encryption, Archiving
• Traffic analysis
• No per-user or per-mailbox pricing
• It’s the only messaging security solution on the market that supports transparent mode inspection.

FortiGate provides inbound scanning for e-mail based threats, but FortiMail provides much deeper analysis and implements a much richer feature set.

I rate technical support 5/5.

We used Exchange Server + FortiGate firewall. FortiMail offers more email security features.

Initial setup is very easy.

No per user or mailbox pricing; industry leading based on price and performance.

The solution is easy to use and easy to configure. It has a very high level of security through special licensing with solutions like FortiGuard, sandboxing solutions in the cloud, and URL rewriting solutions. They are very helpful and secure.

We can install FortiMail products in two different types of installations. One is the security gateway, the inner gateway, and the other is the enterprise mail server. But we never used this product as an enterprise mail server, only a security gateway.

The logging information is sometimes not clear or easy to understand. When the product drops or rejects an email, it is hard to understand what was the original reason why this email was blocked. The logging and the troubleshooting have to improve.

The Forti solutions are not easy to use. We can learn how to use them, but they are not easy. Suppose you must deal with different types of Fortinet products, such as FortiMail, FortiGate, and FortiAuthenticator. In that case, you have to use many different types of troubleshooting, such as through CLI commands and parameters, and it's not too easy to know those off the top of your head.

I've worked with Fortinet FortiMail for four or five years.

I rate FortiMail's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate FortiMail's scalability a nine out of ten. My clients are typically medium to enterprise-sized businesses. Enterprise and medium businesses are not the same from a Fortinet point of view. Especially here in Hungary, which is a little country. When we consider a company enterprise-sized, it might be considered a medium-sized company in the international environment.

I like Fortinet's technical support. But it could always be better.

Positive

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten.

If there is only one gateway in the environment and it's the first deployment, it's easy. However, the initial setup can be difficult if you have to integrate and migrate from different products or solutions.

It took about a week to deploy the solution. But it depends on the difficulty of the environment. Sometimes, we must migrate policies, rules, and other configuration parts from different old mail gateways, such as Symantec Brightmail. And it's not too easy to configure all of the parameters exactly in the new environment.

FortiMail is not cheap. The basic license is not bad, but the high level of solutions is not cheap. Our customers like the basic license but find it too expensive to buy detailed technical solutions.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail a nine out of ten.

It actually filters the compromised emails when on a network layer itself.

The UI could be better.

It's quite stable. Both the on-premises and cloud deployments are quite stable.

It's scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The Fortinet line of products concentrates more on the security of these solutions. That is where we see the competitive advantage over other service providers.

I would definitely recommend Fortinet FortiMail and rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.