Proofpoint Email Protection Reviews

Our primary use case of Proofpoint Email Protection is focused around data loss prevention (DLP). To protect against spam, viruses, incoming and outgoing mail.

Proofpoint Email Protection's detection for true positives are great. False negatives or type two errors are very low. Type one errors are acceptable and this capability is the one that allows the least amount of spam to enter.

The only downside with Proofpoint Email Protection is the cost.

I have been using Proofpoint Email Protection for 5 years.

Proofpoint Email Protection is hosted in the cloud, and the stability is very good. 

The solution is cloud based so it's very scalable. 

The initial setup for Proofpoint Email Protection is pretty straightforward. 

There has been a recent pricing increase with Proofpoint Email Protection and we are assessing other companies who provide a similar service for comparison. 

The advice I would provide others who were considering Proofpoint Email Protection, is to test the product to determine if it provides you with the best filter rate. 

My primary use case for this solution is for email security.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it's a one-stop shop for email protection.

We have some use cases that haven't been dealt with yet, so that could be improved.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Proofpoint's support is very responsive, especially in comparison to Microsoft. Commonly a specialist is available within 24 hours, and the support is more professional overall.

The product has decent functionality. I would rate this product as eight out of ten.

I am the CIO, I have consultants.

We use Proofpoint Email Protection to filter out malicious emails.

We have a lot fewer malicious emails coming in since implementing this product.

The setup was easy.

It was easier to use Microsoft than Proofpoint.

We had some issues with their sales consultant. We got into a dispute and he ended up leaving the company. It's unknown if he was unhappy being at the company, or if it was a reflection of the company, but I can say that their sales consultant was not good.

I think they have everything that I would want in the advanced version.

There are certain things, I would want. I would want better spear phishing protection in the essentials package.

I have been working with Proofpoint Email Protection for two years.

It's a subscription, and we are always using the latest version.

The stability is fine.

The scalability is good.

I am going to reiterate. To move to a more sophisticated email security solution was cost-prohibitive. When you compare it to others, it was too expensive.

All users of the company, all departments were using this solution.

The technical support was okay. I think it was good, although it wasn't outstanding.

It would be excellent, f they had chats and instantaneous responses. That would make it better.

We always struggled with getting on the phone with someone.

We were able to get the same security levels using Microsoft that we were getting with Proofpoint.

With this company, we used Proofpoint straight out of the gate.

We have now switched to Microsoft. The features were definitely there. It was more integrated; people don't have to go to a different website to see what was quarantined. They can see it right in their account on Outlook.

Microsoft is easier to use, it's more integrated, and it's cheaper. It was cheaper than their advanced module, for sure, but it was comparable to their basic package.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to set up.

It took few hours to set up. It was really quick.

We have an admin that would go in to see what was quarantined every now and again a quarter of full-time equivalent approximately 10 hours a week.

This solution was being used every day, 24 hours a day.

We used a consultant to deploy the solution.

I have had a relationship with this consultant for more than 20 years. If I keep a consultant for that long it's because they are worth their weight.

It is always a pleasant experience working with them.

For sure, we have seen a return on investment. It does what it's supposed to do, which is to protects you.

If Proofpoint was the only product out there, I would gladly pay for it. It would be fine and good. But they are not the only game in town. Their competitors managed to give the same level of protection for much less.

The Basic Email Coverage is pretty close to the same price as the Extended Email Security of other companies.

To start basic at Proofpoint, let's say more expensive than other basic packages.

To jump into the Advanced versions of Proofpoint, the costs multiply four or five times, which made it not feasible for us. Being multiple times more expensive, it very much less attractive.

I would advise people to look at the options.

It does what it says it's going to do. The only issue is the cost.

I would rate Proofpoint Email Protection an eight out of ten.

We use it as a corporate or as an exchange email filter to protect, to stop any executables from coming through email, and to halt phishing scams. Basically, the product is for email security. We use it for our network.

Also, if a user thinks that they didn't get an email, we can access the Proofpoint dashboard and go find missing mail that either people didn't get so we can rerelease it to them. Or if it did get quarantined, we can release and approve a sender.

You can blacklist and whitelist sender lists. If you are getting phishing scams that get through the filter, you can end up shutting those down. You can actually block the entire domain so that domain can never email you ever again. 

If there is an external email outside of your network or your company, you can whitelist them if it's an unknown sender, so you don't ever have to worry about missing their emails. 

We had an attempt for a ransomware attack and we were able to block them through Proofpoint Essentials. It's keeping us very safe. Our antivirus shut down the first one and then when the attacker tried again, we were able to block and cease all attacks. In the end, we didn't end up becoming a victim of a ransomware attack.

The solution offers very good flexibility. You can blacklist or whitelist with ease.

Their entire dashboard is excellent. It's completely user-friendly, it's easy to navigate. Anything you need to get done, you can do right from the dashboard, which is incredible. 

What makes it so easy is the features of Proofpoint and how secure it is. 

You could have no IT experience and go in there and control Proofpoint. If your company says "Hey, we need somebody to control Proofpoint," you could hire a kid out of high school to learn it. That's how easy it is.

The Secure Mail aspect should have an Outlook add-in, instead of an external dashboard that outside users have to access. If we send a payment to one of our customers or an ACH or a form to fill out, they have to go through this entire subscription process on a separate website to read the secure mail.

It should be like Ignite, where you can access the internal portal so then our customers aren't having to go through all these hoops just to read an email that we're trying to send them securely. That would be the one thing I would change. Basically, the Secure Mail portal wouldn't be its own portal; it would be an add-in.

I've been using the solution for two years and the company itself has used it for five.

The solution is 100% stable. It's incredible. We haven't had any issues with it. No downtime, no hiccups. Obviously, it's not going to catch everything, however, we have the ability to go in there and block stuff that it does miss. It's an incredible solution.

The scalability capability is based on the packages. We're not at the highest package, however, from what I've read, it's got some incredible scalability. With our package, it does everything we need and we have over 200 users.

It does more than what we need it to. There's stuff we don't even use as we don't use those capabilities of it. The scalability would be incredible as with 200 users we still don't touch all of its features.

As far as I know, we'll continue using it. The company has been happy with it for over five years and I've been around it for two years and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Now that we've added Secure Mail, it's really probably not going anywhere.

I'd rate technical support eight out of ten.

You pay for what you get, and we didn't pay for the enterprise tier, so we're in a middle tier. Sometimes it does take 24 hours to hear back, however, if it's a high priority that they'll call you within 30 minutes. It's pretty incredible how prompt they are. 

Once you do get a hold of them, it's not like, "Okay, well, we'll look this up and we'll call you back." No - they sit there and they'll work you through it. They'll remote into your machine if you need them to. They're excellent.

I haven't previously used any other solution. Before, the company only used the security features in Exchange Online admin center, which obviously wasn't as secure as they wanted it to be. That's why they went to Proofpoint.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's real easy to integrate with Active Directory exchange online. You just pretty much point and click and follow the prompts and it's there. Now, some of the whitelisting, you would have to have some experience, however, not too much. You would want someone knowledgeable to just navigate some of the approved domains and stuff like that to whitelist IPs as that portion was a little more work. 

It probably took about six hours to whitelist IPs. The deployment is a moderate amount of work, however, not much, not a lot.

We didn't do a very complex setup since most of our users are silent users. They have it, however, we don't allow them access as we don't want them to be able to release something onto the network. It probably was a six-hour job to just get everybody added in from Active Directory and integrated into the system.

The maintenance is basically two people. It's all it really takes. It really only takes one person, however, there are usually two of us here that can access it and go in and clean stuff up. And as far as the roles, there's not really assigned roles for who goes in and does what. As far as users, they're silent users and active users, and only active users can actually access the portal, and then the administration is the only one that can change settings.

We did use a consultant to help us with the implementation. Our network admin did most of the work, however, the consultants were there just to guide us through it, just in case we hit a hiccup, which we didn't. 

The consultants were great. They were easy to work with. They were prompt in responses.

The biggest ROI for us was when it stopped a ransomware attack. It could have cost us a ton of money. It could have been detrimental to the company. It basically paid for itself right there.

The licensing is basically $8/user. We pay yearly, however, they do allow for month-to-month billing.

It's just a straight licensing fee. For support, you'll pay extra for that. If you want to move up to a higher tier, I don't know how much it is, however, I know you pay more to get a higher level of support. Tier One support is way cheaper than Tier Four. You are paying pretty much to have your own project manager. Proofpoint literally assigns someone to you. When you call, it's getting taken care of by his or her team. That's pretty expensive, however, I'm not sure of the cost.

I'd advise users to get the package with the Secure Mail feature and then make sure that you whitelist all your important IPs and then add domains of all known users, so you don't run across any blocked or missing mail.

Our users have learned to be more careful and look for more phishing attempts from it, because now they know what a normal email should look like instead of, "Hey, here's a link you need to update your password." And then just clicking away. Through this they've been able to see, because we can show them, "Look, this is blocked, this wasn't, here's why." Right. So we've been actually able to teach that culture and teach the hesitancy. With this solution, our users have become much more informed.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's a great product and they have great customer service, a great support team.

We use this solution as a firewall for our email environment; it's basically a reputation-based service. It denies the connection from known bad sites. That's the biggest protection they have when you go to the antivirus and anti-spam modules. They even have an encryption piece in it.

There's Microsoft Office 365 email protection. The one good thing they have over Microsoft is their incredible search engine. That's why our clients like it. They like the search engine because they can search anything to do with their messages incredibly easily. This allows them to find troubleshooting issues. That's a big selling point.

There are some tools within it that are amazing. Even from a configuration standpoint, it's a hardened system. It's never been penetrated, so that's another great feature about Proofpoint.

They handle combined attacks. Defender for Office 365 does this as well. For instance, if you have an obfuscated URL embedded into an email and the email looks very legitimate, they can track that. Provepoint offers the same flexibility when combined with Office 365 as well. You can do your spam scores, and you can set up policies for people. From here, they can make a decision whether to select a spam policy or not. You can do the same thing with a lot of products, but Proofpoint makes it easy.

They all have quarantines where you can release messages. They're all very on par with each other. However, if you don't have Defender for Office 365, the feature parity is just not there. But there are lots of selling points, Proofpoint, in particular, takes care of. Still, they have a business continuity piece that is lacking in the Office 365 suite.

Not one of them is one hundred percent when it comes to reputation scores. It doesn't matter which solution — none of them are. Not one of them is a hundred percent on false negatives or false positives.

Proofpoint scores way up there along with Cisco. You used to have a choice with Proofpoint which one you use. They may be using multiples now, too. Proofpoint is the main tool for blocking spam because it denies the connection altogether.

I know for a fact that I can set Proofpoint up to what they call SYN attacks. SYN attacks basically open a connection, and then a handshake starts, and thousands of connections form. So, Proofpoint waits for a timeout to occur and then allows you to tie up all your connections, which is basically an out-of-service attack. They have something similar in Office 365, too.

Still, the reputation services, the antivirus modules, none of them are a hundred percent when it comes to false positives or false negatives.

It's the whole industry. The SMTP protocol needs to be totally rewritten. It was designed in the fifties or sixties. Changing it would be very, very difficult.

They put band-aids on it for security — that's essentially what's happened with that. That email is not secure by design because it's still using an old design from many moons ago.

I have been working with Proofpoint Email Protection for 15 years.

It's scalable, but the devil's in the details — you have to know your email volumes. Like anything else, you've got to know those kinds of things. You have to know email volumes, you have to properly scale it, and this is the bottom line. I've seen people do a lot of really stupid things.

I've always had good luck with both. I think Proofpoint has always been superior — they do a very, very good job. They're a small organization though, so it's pretty tightly controlled as far as versioning is concerned. Compared to Microsoft, which is a huge organization, the lack of documentation revisions, that's where you have a harder time finding the information and connecting the dots than you do with Proofpoint.

When it comes to the initial setup, you have to know the product well or get outside help; that's literally what it comes down to it. You have to know what the hell are you doing with email. Literally, I just had one client acquired a company that wanted to put Proofpoint Email Protection behind their email messaging security gateways — they don't know how to do it. If you're running M365 and you decide you want to put it behind Proofpoint, for instance, you have to know how to set up both to route email inbound and outbound, to your message security gateways.

Proofpoint is fairly expensive. Most people, when they go to buy their M365 licenses, they buy them in a bundle. It's more than just email protection. It's actually lots of different protections. 

You need to be able to connect the dots on what the licensing buys you and what that particular module is to accomplish. Therefore, it behooves you to get someone that understands how the product works, what each module's intended for, what the licensing entails, and the cost-effectiveness of it.

It's one of the top products out there. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

It's just got the BC feature on it. If you get Defender for Office 365 specifically, that is the key to email protection from the Microsoft product. If you don't have that, then you will either have to purchase a third-party product or buy the add-on for Defender for Office 365.

Our primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection is for email security, to secure all the inbound and outbound emails.

The improvement was achieved by solving the problem of huge false positives and thus saving the time wasted by me in advance to check the legitimate e-mails that Symantec Messaging Gateway had stopped by mistake.

In addition to the additional protection layers that we got in this solution, such as : URL Defense , Attachment Defense (Sandboxing)

I like all the features with Proofpoint, such as how it filters the spam and marketing mail, lost reality mail, blocks phishing attacks, blocks malicious attachments, and stops phishing links. Also it can defend against the business email compromise impersonation technique. It is a complete solution for all email attacks. It filters for the bad, malicious attachments. If there is any executable file, it can be deleted. It is a good, complete solution.

Additionally, the user interface is good, it's easy to use. Whoever has good technical skills can understand it. Even the normal user can handle this solution easily. By the way, I was using Symantec Messaging Gateway. I don't recommended it at all, it makes a lot of issues. A lot of false positives were happening. So I started evaluating Proofpoint and Mimecast. Both products are okay, but I liked Proofpoint more because I saw that it has a high accuracy, offers a very good service, and their support is amazing. So as a whole product, I preferred Proofpoint. But Mimecast is also good.

I have been using Proofpoint Email Protection for four months.

Proofpoint is stable I have not had any issues. Their system was never down over the last four or five months. Their system is fine, perfect until now. It is okay, it's stable, without any issues.

In terms of scalability, they have many bundles, but I only take the section that will secure my email, both the inbound and the outbound email. Now they have other advanced bundles, for example for email archiving. I didn't take it. They have other sections and other bundles, but I'm not interested in them because I have alternative solutions.

I previously used Symantec. After the acquisition process, Symantec was sold to Broadcom. There are many reasons I switched to Proofpoint. The first one was that their support became very bad. If you opened a ticket they would respond after two weeks. Secondly, the quality, stability, and accuracy of their product started to be bad. So much legitimate mail was stopped by this solution which made issues with my business, even for the outbound email. I switched because of the quality of the product and the product support.

The initial setup is normal. It's not complex. Yes I'm a technical guy so I didn't face any issues. For me it was okay to implement, maybe it only took two or three hours.

Proofpoint is a little bit expensive. The pricing could be more competitive.

Mimecast and Barracuda prices are cheaper than Proofpoint. But there are other vendors, like Firefly and others whose prices are not cheap. But they provided me a good price because I was a Symantec customer moving to Proofpoint. I think the price is significant, it's not too expensive but not cheap. Just a little bit expensive. But everything is included.

My advice is that any customer who is concerned for his users has to look at Proofpoint. I recommend Proofpoint. You see a lot of attacks coming through emails. So I recommend Proofpoint for any customer, regardless of the size of the company. By the way, they have another product for smaller companies, the essential version. I have the enterprise version because I need more customization with more features. The smaller companies who have less than 100 users can go with the essential version, which is cheaper.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Proofpoint Email Protection a nine.

We use it in front of Office 365 for anti-phishing, anti-malware, and threat protection.

Proofpoint Email Protection has reduced the analyst overhead in responding to phishing incidents by several orders of magnitude. We did not have the resources to respond directly to all Phishing Reports under the old system  With automated responses, we are able to address all Phishing Reports automatically.

Its anti-phishing functionality is very valuable to the organization.  As outlined above, we are able to automatically respond to Phishing Reports as well as stop as much as 80% of most Phishing Attacks at the front end leaving only a small percentage to be handled after the fact.

It has too many screens. It is kind of a conglomeration of products. In other words, they built product A, product B, and product C, and they are yet to integrate them into a single administrative console. I would certainly like to see a more seamless administrative interface. 

I would also like to see them include more bang for the buck, by including features like email fraud protection, rather than making their product so piecemeal, where you are buying little pieces. I agree with the idea of having multiple tiers or layers, but maybe as small, medium, and large, as opposed to an a la carte menu.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is very stable.

It is fairly scalable. When we had a problem with capacity on one of the clusters, we simply added more members. We have probably 32,000 to 34,000 users in a given period.

Their technical support is mediocre. It could be better. They're a little slow to respond at times, and depending on the product, they're not always very knowledgeable. In one case, I had to fix it myself and show their tech how to fix it.

I found it to be fairly straightforward. It had medium complexity. The deployment was very fairly fast. I did it in about three to four hours.

Annually, it costs us about $92,000. This is pretty much what it costs us. There is no additional cost.

I evaluated Microsoft ATP or Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection. I also evaluated Mimecast at least at face value. I also looked at GreatHorn technologies.

They're the best in the breed. I would rate Proofpoint Email Protection a ten out of ten for the capability of doing its job. I am happy with this solution.

We primarily use the solution to block malicious email and spam in bulk.

The URL rewrites on the solution are excellent.

The system offers good flexibility.

The initial implementation is pretty easy to handle.

The solution is quite reliable and doesn't fail.

The solution needs to better detect emails that don't have a malicious payload. They need to ensure those that have a link to a malicious Google Drive or something like that are captured.

We find the cost to be prohibitive.

Their smart search needs to be much more intuitive and flexible.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't crash or freeze and we don't experience bugs or glitches. It's quite reliable.

We don't plan on increasing the solution's usage in the future.

Technical support is very, very good. We've found them to be knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of service.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was pretty straightforward.

The solution is quite expensive.

Right now, we're paying about $80,000.

We're simply customers of the solution. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. 

The advice that I would give to other companies who are considering using the solution is to really test the systems, even for outlandish attacks, to see if it will hold up.

For me personally, I actually have two Proofpoint accounts. I have a Proofpoint account for something completely unrelated to B&H and I was able to prove that's almost anything you think of you can do, although it might not say in the documentation or the people at Proofpoint might not think of that scenario, however, it's still a way to achieve almost everything you were trying to achieve with your email filter. 

The flexibility is unbelievable. And you could get very creative. You just need to be very careful to not mess it up. However, you could get extremely creative to accommodate real case scenarios.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.