Netgear ProSecure UTM10 review

Netgear's security partners need no introduction as you have Mailshell handling anti-spam, Sophos scanning for viruses and malware plus Commtouch delivering URL category filtering. There's more as the stream scanning technology first seen in Netgear's higher-end STM appliances is also present. This uses a multi-threaded approach to provide near real time scanning of all network traffic.

Mailshell offers good anti-spam measures and along with five different sensitivity levels for its spam analysis you have standard black and white lists and supports for RBLs. For SMTP you can tag, block or log spam messages whilst for POP3 you can only tag them. Infected mail attachments can also be stripped out and a custom message inserted in the subject line.

For the price, the Commtouch web filtering is a bargain as it offers more than 60 categories to pick and choose from. As with the firewall, you also have default settings active that block users from a general set of common web nasties.

Along with POP3, SMTP and IMAP, Sophos' anti-virus measures can be applied to HTTP, FTP and even HTTPS traffic. The latter is a feature we don't normally expect to see at this price point making the UTM10 excellent value.

Nuisance IM and P2P apps can be controlled but the list is small and this also only extends to blocking or allowing them. Even so, it worked fine during testing as we could stop clients using Windows Messenger and Live from logging in. We also blocked all access to BitTorrent and saw clients such as Vuze failing to log in and unable to download anything.