We are evaluating  anti-spam and virus protection products for internal emails. MS has a free anti-spam agent comes with exchange HUB/Edge server. We already have McAfee email gateways to protect external emails. Will the free ant-spam be sufficient to protect internal emails? We are investigating McAfee Security for Email servers (formal groupshield ). Any comments on this product? Thanks in

Hi,

According to your description, I understand that you have already install McAfee email gateways, and you want to enable official anti-spam to protect internal security.
If I misunderstand your concern, please do not hesitate to let me know.

I recommend use only one anti-spam software to prevent complex issue.
Groupshield and other antivirus products prevent transport services from running until the antivirus engine is ready first.  This prevents Exchange from processing messages w/o Antivirus protection.
However, official anti-spam filter apply for inbound mail flow in Edge server, also hub transport server for internal network. For your reference: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997242(v=exchg.141).aspx
Antivirus functionality is further improved by the addition of Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server as a Microsoft solution. Please refer to: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795191.aspx

Thanks

Hi 

According to your environment the best approach would be 

Have your existing McAfee email gateways to filter incoming internet emails and outgoing emails to internet.

In addition to this  you can always have exchange antispam agents installed which will give you additional security at no additional cost. 

Later if you notice any spam mails circulating  internally then you can think of any additional spam solutions.

Also as suggested by Allen  we need to always ensure that we are aware of all the settings configured in the spam filtering in our organization in all the levels as it can interrupt the end users in sending and receiving emails if this configuration is not correct.

Thanks Sathish for replying. We want to minimize the interruption to end users when enabling the free anti-spam. Will the default settings be a good start?

Thanks Allen for replying. Does the free anti-spam agent come with reporting functionality?

Hi Sathish, one more question, what the impact to server performance(CPU,memory, disk) when enabling anti-spam?

Hi 

Exchange 2013 Antispam and antimalware  has the basic built-in anti-spam protection features.
Reporting kind of feature will not be available and end user spam management console will also not be available since it has the basic features which will give an additional layer of SMTP security .

But you can configure a spam quarantine mailbox which can help you in your scenario. You can review quarantined messages and release them to their intended recipients by using the Send Again feature in Microsoft Outlook.

Server performance,CPU utilization , disk utilization will not be affected by enabling the exchange antispam agents.

Initially you can go with this since you can tighten the SMTP security on your MCAFEE gateway and use exchange 2013 antispam  for internal emails and  second layer of protection for internet emails as well. I think this should do the job provided if you have configured reverse DNS for your SMTP connections and SPF records and your mcafee SMTP filtering gateway does the job.

Later if you see any spam  emails coming through then you can bring up an additional antispam filtering agent 

You can follow the below articles to configure antispam  according to Microsoft best suggestions

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123746(v=exchg.150).aspx 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201691(v=exchg.150).aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj218660(v=exchg.150).as