GFI MailEssentials

"System administrator"

Pros: It's very easy to install system. Mostly the default configuration works out of the box without any problems.

Cons: The system is somewhat easy to use. They have a lot of limitations when you try to do advanced configuration load or reset spam lists.

"We have used GFI Mail essentials for the past two years to archive our email for our users to access"

Comments: The ability to quickly and effectively archive our emails and retrieve them via a simple web browser gui.

Pros: It has performed very well as far as the archiving of our emails. Our users are able to retrieve their own emails for themselves therefore reducing the administration overhead of doing the same tasks ourselves.

Cons: There are only a few gripes and most are minor. One being the amount of segmented archives that seem to get created. Integration with our domain was a little tricky.

"Brain-dead easy to manage, but brain-dead stupid software"

Pros: I suppose the management interface is generally intuitive, though something as simple as whitelisting an individual address or domain can be stupidly cumbersome. Oh, that email address your manager asked you to whitelist still isn't being allowed through? Better make sure you hit 'apply' in both areas, including the more hidden one not readily apparent from the section you enter the email address. Support is fairly responsive, but I have not once had a serious issue resolved by them and isntead referred to their published knowledge base myself. This is not the fault of their support, but instead limitations of the software itself.

Cons: Where to begin? Extraordinarily limited anti-spam, anti-spoof and antivirus engines cause so much spam to waltz through on an hourly basis. It is an absolute embarassment of a product that is humiliating to our department - we've switched to Mimecast which we hopefully plan to implement in the next few weeks. We were saved by our endpoint antivirus software, mercifully, when an email spoofing our domain recently was sent to nearly every user in the company simultaneous attached with a crypto payload in a word doc. It is inexcuseable for software this poorly functioning to be marketed and sold at the price they are requesting. This may be particular to our environment due to the nature of our business and the tremendous email volume, so a smaller company may have success with it.

"Set it and Forget it AntiSPAM product that we use for most of our non-Office365 Clients"

Pros: The Installation is fairly quick and easy.
GFI has a host of add-ons so it makes it easier to piece-meal the products you want to add to your deployment.
Love the end-user SPAM/Quarantine Access.
The Daily Digest feature is excellent, clients like the reports they get daily.

Cons: Can get cumbersome if you start going into the minutiae.
The Licensing part I'm not very fond of, if you go over the quantity the software simply stops working after a week or so of grace-period.
I would prefer if they sent email reminders when License renewal is closer.
Customer Service is hard to get a hold of.

"A bit finicky"

Pros: Once you get it configured it does a great job of filtering out spam.

Cons: Loves to crash in the middle of the night and fill users boxes with spam.