Overview

GFI MailEssentials can be installed in two ways; either directly on the Microsoft® Exchange server, or on an Email gateway (relay/perimeter) server. This article describes the advantages and disadvantages of the two deployment scenarios.

Solution

MailEssentials Installed on the Exchange Server

Advantages:

• The Action to move to users' junk email folder is only available when GFI MailEssentials is installed on the same machine as Microsoft Exchange Server.
• The Action to move to a sub-folder in a user's mailbox is only available when GFI MailEssentials is installed on the same machine as Exchange Server.

Disadvantages:

• Depending on the hardware configuration, MailEssentials consumes compute resources that might otherwise be utilized by the Exchange Server.

MailEssentials Installed as a Gateway Server

 Advantages

• Server compute resources can be dedicated to GFI MailEssentials and not shared with the Microsoft Exchange Server.
• Spam emails are filtered before they are forwarded to the mail server therefore any unwanted emails are not processed by the Exchange Server. This should improve the overall performance of the Exchange Server
• This deployment architecture can provide an additional level of fault-tolerance as Emails are queued in MailEssentials for later delivery incase the Exchange server is down.

Disadvantages

• The Exchange-related actions which include moving emails to the users' junk mail folder and moving emails to a sub-folder of the users' mailboxes are not available when GFI MailEssentials is installed on a Gateway machine.

Further information about how MailEssentials can be deployed is available here: Typical Deployment Scenarios