Anti SPAM....

I agree with the comments about country filtering being unsuitable for many orgs.

The bit in this article that realy scares me is the comment about having the MTA scan outgoing messages.... "There's so much going on in your network that's not through your mail system, and if you can't detect that".... what?!? surely your firewall should already be dropping port 25 from anything that isn't you SMTP server??

Also, most people structure their networks such that the mail servers and MTA solutions sit in a DMZ area straight off the gateway... so very little is passing through your core network in any case. So filtering at the edge makes little difference to most users (after all you are still going to want it to traverse the firewall). I agree that in most cases outsources solutions such as Messagelabs offer better protection then any MTA based solution and have the added advantage lf filtering BEFORE the edge of your network, saving wastage of your far more sensitive and expensive internet connections >90)