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Appriver Review: Ack-river!

9 Responses (Add) | Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 9:11pm

When I tried to recover a false positive from the Rackspace spam management tool (Appriver?), I ran into an error. This hiccup was ticketed immediately, and a few hours later I had received a response from their support team. Indeed, Rackspace support is fanatical.

I was trying to resend several false positives at once… but… well, let me just say that this Appriver spam utility is not very intuitive at all. Seems that I must release one message at a time, without batching the process… having to view each particular message separately, when all I have to go on is a limited set of information in the general (quarantine) list.

The Appriver spam management tool is not intuitive for a lot of reasons:

  • The daily email digest is very nice, but not configurable at all – I’d much rather see this bulletin sorted by country of origin by default.

  • The Quarantine list, itself, doesn’t give me any kind of indication as to spam probability – nor does it give me a quick preview of the message in question. As such, I have to click the “Resend” button to preview or re-confirm a resending of the message.
  • There’s no indication as to whether or not a message that has been resent has actually been resent – and could, therefore, possibly be resent more than once.
  • There is no “probability” field to sort by in the Quarantine list.
  • There is no easy way to whitelist a sender from the Quarantine list.
  • I have to manage hundreds of spam messages a day, and Appriver isn’t dynamic (requiring a page reload for every change – pop-up windows for other changes).

Rackspace may have fanatical support, but I’m a bit concerned with their management software choices. Appriver leaves a LOT to be desired.

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9 Comments

Barry Rowars

April 3rd, 2008
at 3:13pm

Given the direction I see here; who is the best for exchange hosting then? Especially since I run entourage on MAC.

Thanks for any information given

Dusty

April 10th, 2008
at 11:48am

Don’t look for Exchange hosting. Look for a great Zimbra host instead. They can emulate Exchange better than Exchange can and their “ZWA” is better than OWA anyday. Just do a search for “zimbra outlook hosting” and you’ll find plenty. They support Outlook, IMAP, POP3, and Blackberries. Integrates with CRM systems really nicely. And they’re cheaper too.

Amanda

October 16th, 2008
at 9:24pm

Well – I just left AppRiver and let me tell you I had a terrible experience working there. Here are the facts:

AppRiver Employees get the Administrator passwords on their first day. That’s right – no background check – nothing. They can redirect or read anyone’s e-mails.

They have absolutely no monitoring on their servers – they basically wait for the phones to start ringing to determine if something is down.

They use a crappy Linksys with WEP. Yes, you can sit in their parking lot with AiroCrack and sniff away.

Their head “engineers” have absolutely no idea how basic e-mail security works. They even use e-mail headers to determine what should be whitelisted which opens the door to spammers. Look at an AppRiver customer’s e-mail headers sometime.

In addition, after around 3PM – e-mail delays are up to 30 minutes! Stay away from these people and buy yourself a Barracuda SpamWall.

AppRiver staffers

October 23rd, 2008
at 3:03pm

Josh,

Enough is enough. You only worked at AppRiver for 3 months. It has been over a year now since we gave you a chance. Don’t you think it is time you moved on and quit posting your rants all over the web trying to make it look like it is from legitimate customers. Lame! Move along please.

Macy Miller

November 13th, 2008
at 9:08am

The company I work for uses Appriver and we have been very happy with it. We very rarely get spam and we always get our e-mails on time. The technical support is great and a live person always answers the phone. I would recommend Appriver to everyone.

David Brown

November 29th, 2008
at 9:31am

What fools you are people! Rackspace and Appriver are glove in hand. Rackspace is the upstream provider. I caught this whole SCAM a few years back when I noticed email to the school my son attends bouncing. After some investigation and admonishing the hapless school email administrator I discovered in my email server logs that the real upstream culprit as Rackspace itself. This is how the SCAM works: the upstream provider (Rackspace) becomes very SPAM permissive. This means they host and allow the SPAMMERS to operate freely as long as they pay there high bandwidth bills. After a few months of non-stop SPAMMING the white knight (Appriver) appears and magically all the SPAM disappears when you sign on the dotted-line! Fools!

Al B

February 24th, 2009
at 7:21am

Have to say Amanda’s post does not fit our experience at all.

We’ve been using AppRiver for hosted Exchange with Shoreline spam filtering for around 2 years. Always been very impressed with service, support, pricing and features, including BlackBerry. Love the absence of mailbox storage caps (the only cap is technical, though Excchange must have limits somewhere, i.e. smaller is always faster/better with Exchange/Outlook, but I’ve been up to 4GB/5GB on several occasions). Servers and management console have both seen upgrades since we’ve been there. Support is prompt and generally excellent and they don’t condescend when asked obvious stuff. Easy enough to try for yourself as no contract lock in (always a good sign imo).

Shoreline anti-spam might not be particularly intuitive, but it does the job and I wasn’t any more impressed in the past by Postini or MX Logic — again both good/fine but not obviously better for a smaller business.

I’ve used other, pricier Exchange hosts (and respectable Linux guys) and AppRiver is definitely the best I’ve tried. Only alternative I would currently consider is Google Apps premium.

Had no idea there is a Rackspace link for AppRiver, but for me that’s another vote of confidence as Rackspace have the Rolls-Royce reputation (and cost — we chose NOT to use them for email in part for that reason!).

Sadly, no commercial or other link other than a satisfied customer. Not even in the US!

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