Fortinet FortiMail Reviews

We have FortiMail running on-premises on a virtual client. It is currently serving emails for about 400 employees that we have here. All this is taking place on the same server, and for the past three months it has been our main guarantee for email security.

FortiMail has taken good care of the deliverability and security of emails within our organization, protecting our many users from all kinds of security threats.

FortiMail is extremely flexible and very easy to learn. Compared to other email security products that we've tried, it is mainly the ease of configuration that makes FortiMail valuable to us.

It doesn't take an engineer to be able to get up and running with FortiMail, and one can get by with little more than the online documentation and YouTube, for example.

I have little to say about possible improvements, but the configuration for content blocking could be better. So, for example, if the email text and/or subject includes any kind of keyword and/or phrase, for example "You have a Bitcoin", I would like it to be easier to block it before it enters an inbox. Fortinet could maybe offer better or simpler help on how to do this properly. 

Besides that, I feel that we have everything we need for our company with FortiMail.

Our company has been using Fortinet FortiMail for three months now. 

During testing we have found FortiMail to be very stable and there have been no major incidents. It is one of the most stable Fortinet products we have used.

We have successfully used FortiMail for around 400 email users so far. It is very flexible.

We don't have any experience with the official international support because our partners at High Tech Solutions in Georgia, with whom we have a close business relationship, are our main support channel.

They are highly professional, well-educated, and always available to help us. Even when working hours are over, they are happy to offer support from their excellent engineers. They truly stand behind Fortinet products and it shows.

For email security purposes, we previously used Barracuda Firewall. We had the firewall installed in the system which we were using for free emails. Now we are transforming our system to use FortiMail as it is more of an all-in-one solution that has everything we need.

FortiMail is very easy to set up and configure. This is one of the main reasons why we enjoy using it.

There is just one guy who works on the admin and configuration, and an InfoSec officer who looks into incidents by analyzing events and logs. Beyond that, we also receive input from the head of department and other management.

In terms of licensing, we are using a virtual machine license for the single virtual server which it runs on. Doing it this way enables us to cut costs by only licensing FortiMail for our exact use case. If you need to expand in future, you can later buy extra licenses per virtual machine.

We could have continued with Barracuda, but after trying out FortiMail for a short time, we now prefer it over Barracuda. 

After three months of evaluating FortiMail, it has exceeded our expectations and we will definitely continue using it.

I would rate Fortinet FortiMail a ten out of ten. 

I'm not working on the local FortiMail installation and really concentrate on servicing and deploying FortiMail to clients. The primary uses depending on the client are anti-spam and anti-fishing as well as threat isolation.

This product has improved our organization by giving us another opportunity to sell a top product to our clients that will do what it was designed to do.

Personally, I believe that FortiMail is a very good antispam solution. Clients use this solution as well for anti-spam and anti-phishing.

I believe the product needs better integration with FortiSandbox and integration with third-party Sandbox solutions.

What clients would like, I think, is more features on the appliances. Processing power is very important and this is dependent on abilities to upgrade the appliance.

The clients seem to always like the stability of the product. They always like the way it functions, the support knowledge we provide when necessary and that they really have to do nothing to keep the product functioning.

The product is definitely a scalable solution. For example, we have a customer — a very technical customer who recently expanded operations — and we managed to expand the solution to fit their new needs on request.

It is a very good solution compared to the competition due to the capacity of the appliance and the number or volume of emails it can handle. It is almost independent of the number of users. That's why it has a very good competitive advantage.

We have a good support team to contact at Fortinet if we need them. They are available and reliable.

I believe that the complexity of the initial setup depends on the customer's environment and their need. This can increase or decrease the complexity of deployment. Generally, it takes between 10 to 20 working days to fully deploy. And then we require only occasional support for maintenance, again depending on the case.

We are Fortinet partners and act as consultants while also doing installations and maintenance.

According to clients, there is a return on investment in the cost of ownership and value. That is it ends up costing most clients less than other solutions while providing as much in features and services or more.

There are subscription fees but I don't think there is an additional cost. The pricing is not my area of expertise, but clients seem to suggest the license cost is competitive. It depends on capacity and not the number of users.

My title at our company is Presale Security Solutions Manager for service security. I service presale and consulting for FortiGate and other mail gateway solutions. Fortinet is one of our top products in this sector. I'm often selling different Fortinet solutions like FortiGate, FortiMail, and FortiSandbox as well. Sometimes we will consider other products but this is our main line.

With the Fortinet FortiMail solution, you have a lot of advantages because of the effectiveness of security. You also see a return on investment in the cost of ownership and value. The licensing value — as I hear from clients — is very good, and the capacity of FortiMail is very scalable. You can have a large number of users and pay according to the capacity, not on the number of users so you pay for actual use. 

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and 10 is the best, I give FortiMail an eight out of ten.

We are an integrator company, so we are installing to these products, the different customers.  We explain Fortinet solutions to our customers, and if they want, we can do a proof of concept for one month or so. Then, if they are happy and want to move forward, we will install it on their site. After that, we provide support for one to three years, depending on the contract. I did the POC of FortiMail for three big companies, and later they had no budget because they ran into a cash flow problem, and we ended up just waiting. Still, we are contacting our customers and trying to sell the Fortinet product FortiMail.

The GUI isn't hard to use. When we do a demo and explain the features of Fortinet products to our customers, they understand very quickly. They can easily manage their systems without us. But other products are a little more complicated. For example, if we're talking about firewall systems, I use Palo Alto, but I prefer the Fortinet solution because it's easier to use. They're effortless. When I try to configure the SD-WAN, it's just one or two clicks. I can route all applications with the destination. It's no problem for me. The other configuration also is very easy. Palo Alto may be more powerful for inspection, but my priority is making the customer happy. Also, they have the Fabric architecture, so when we sell one Fortinet product to the government, we can easily sell the others because they have the Fabric architecture as well. We are working with other products from different companies, but if you ask about email solutions, we prefer FortiMail.

Maybe FortiMail's integration could be better.

I've been using FortiMail for about five years.

FortiMail is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

FortiMail is highly scalable. We've installed it in big government agencies without any problems.

Fortinet's support responds very fast. Normally within Turkey, we can get support. We don't talk to the central Fortinet support. The Turkey partner program companies are enough for us. Currently, we have the high technical Fortinet certification, but sometimes we have trouble, so we contact the Fortinet Turkey technical managers and get a fast response from them.

Installation is effortless with all Fortinet products. With simple settings, the initial installation takes half an hour tops. Then, if the customer wants a custom configuration, that might take five additional minutes. Customers almost always want something, and we have to update the configuration. One admin is enough to handle everything. The admin has to talk to the customer. You can do some templates, but every customer's needs are different. For example, sending 5,000 emails from one source to a destination is a big problem. You could get flagged as spam. But for some personal reasons, this setup might be needed because the customer is in a relationship with others, so perhaps he will send advertising emails to the customers, so 5,000 is okay. You can allow just this functionality for just one person and deny it to others. So it's adaptable for the needs of each customer, but one admin guy is enough.

I don't know the price of other products, but the cost of FortiMail is moderate. The customers don't want to haggle. When they see what the solution can do, they are willing to pay for it. They are most likely getting quotes from various companies, and the Fortinet product is the most cost-effective. The performance is very high because they're trying all the products on their site. At the end of the day, they look at the performance and the price, and  Fortinet covers all the bases.

I rate FortiMail nine out of 10. I don't know what other solution is the best, but we are happy with Fortinet products. We offer FortiMail to all our customers. For example, when I go to any customer to explain the different solutions, I mention FortiMail if they don't have a mail solution. Or perhaps they have another product that they're using, say Kaspersky Mail Protection, but they're not getting any support from Kaspersky, so nobody knows how it's working. They installed the device, but nobody provided them support. In a situation like this, our sales pitch for Fortinet is that we will provide three years of support. Also, Fortinet itself provides support for them 24-7, so they're getting a fast response from Fortinet.

We are not using FortiMail as a mail server but we are using it only as a security gateway where it scans all the incoming and outgoing emails in our organization.

The most valuable features are the granular features of antispam and strong antivirus database.

The solution is user-friendly to a degree but the dashboard needs improvement.

We would like to see in an upcoming release reports to show the amount of data a particular user has used.

I have been using this solution for approximately six months.

Fortinet FortiMail is very reliable and stable since the databases are very strong.

The solution is scalable, we are able to integrate other hardware, such as FortiGate 5, or other solutions we have in our organization.

We have approximately 2,000 people using this solution in my organization.

We have support 24/hours a day, they are helpful and responsive.

No

The installation was straightforward.

There is a license required for this solution and it is on an annual basis. I am satisfied with the price.

I have evaluated Barracuda.

I would recommend this solution to others and advise them to use the 400F series or higher because lower models do not have the DLP feature which is very important to have.

I rate Fortinet FortiMail a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for identifying spam, viruses, zero-day spamming, and any other kind of spam issues our organization might face.

We have several of these solutions in place. We do have, as of late, spam outbreaks. This solution has been pretty reliable in dealing with them. 

The solution can scale.

The solution is mostly stable.

Sometimes it takes a little bit too long to determine if an email is good or not. If they could shorten that time span, it'd be so much better. It does delay our email, which does not make users happy. That said, I would have to say we have not been blacklisted for quite a while now.

Sometimes there are false positives.

When spam goes into system quarantine, it would be ideal if there was a safe way to let the users review the email in question and release it themselves, as opposed to having to wait on an administrator, to search for it and release it. It could be done securely. I understand why the system quarantines. However, a lot of users have their financial documents or lawyer's documents get thrown into the system quarantine and they're waiting on them. They need them within the hour as they are often time-sensitive matters. Due to this, they have to contact me. They wait for a while because they don't know when it's going to come, however, eventually they have to contact me. It's a delay. People understandably get very impatient.

There are some emails that go through that should be given a login code - for example, like whenever you're signing up for Microsoft in the cloud and they have to send you a login code. These codes from well-known vendors get stuck in the spam outbreak. They get stuck in different places. 

Whitelisting should be a little bit friendlier for the users. It was actually easier a few versions back. Once you logged into your Fortimail account, you could whitelist very easily. Now, you have to kind of navigate through the email to do it. We cannot turn on the auto whitelist feature on because then there are users that will download anything without thinking, so we never use the auto whitelist feature. That's why it's so important to make whitelisting individually an easy task.

I've used the solution within the last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is mainly good. We do occasionally get false positives, however, it's rare.

It is very scalable and it does work well for what it's doing.

We've been satisfied with the technical support. They always are able to help us with upgrades and implementations. We find them to be quite knowledgeable.

For us, the setup is pretty straightforward. However, it's that way due to the fact that we use technical support to assist us. If we were to do it on our own, it may be difficult to implement. It's not something that I could just pull up and do on my own. I don't feel like I could. The knowledge of the engineers is very beneficial.

In our use case scenario, we do have support to help us set it up. In all the scenarios, even when I migrate to another upgrade or to a different box, even though we've had this for several years, we always use support.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. If it weren't for issues surrounding quarantining emails, I'd rate it higher.

We're using Fortinet FortiMail for general purposes. It's for analyzing mail, stopping attacks, and stopping all SPAM.

The biggest implementation my team has done for Fortinet FortiMail was for more than five thousand people, and the most valuable feature was its anti-spam feature.

It's difficult for me to talk about areas for improvement in Fortinet FortiMail because I'm the general manager of the company and I'm an engineer with knowledge about the solution, but I'm not deeply involved in its implementation. As I mentioned previously, Fortinet FortiMail is also being used within the company, and I'm happy with its functionality, but sometimes, attacks pass and avoid the Fortinet FortiMail filters, but those could be very sophisticated attacks. There could still be an improvement in the filtering feature of the solution, though the security of Fortinet FortiMail is okay for me because I believe you can't implement one hundred percent security in any solution.

The initial setup for the solution also needs improvement. The setup is supposed to be simple, but then the customer starts to complain that some of the false positive emails are reaching quarantine, so my team has to configure it again. 

There have been instances when Fortinet FortiMail rejects valid emails because some of the service partners of the customer have not been configured accurately, so the system considered valid mails as attacks to be quarantined, so aside from improving the filters, there should also be an improvement in the categorization of emails in the server. My team has to modify the configuration so that valid emails could pass and for Fortinet FortiMail to correctly filter the SPAM traffic.

A feature that could be added to Fortinet FortiMail in its next release is advanced AI, so it can analyze and decide accurately on which mail is valid and which mail is SPAM.

My company has two projects with Fortinet FortiMail. One project is three years, and the other is a big project that's been running for one year now. The solution is also being used in-house within my company.

Fortinet FortiMail is a stable product, particularly based on functionality.

In terms of the scalability of Fortinet FortiMail, it depends on the implementation because you have two types of implementation, the virtual machine, and the appliance.

If you're using the appliance, you have to think about the future, for example, maybe now the customer needs a certain level of traffic to be filtered, then in two or three years, the level of traffic needs to increase, so you have to propose a bigger machine that can handle the evolution in traffic.

In the VM implementation, you also need to take some steps, for example, you have to figure out the server type, number of CPUs, RAMs, and OPS requirements, based on the level of traffic and request level.

It's easier to upgrade or scale on VMs, even if the client requirements increase dramatically.

Fortinet FortiMail offers two types of support, standard and elite. Standard support is paid annually. My company has the elite type of support which means there's a dedicated person to solve issues.

The standard support team usually recommends upgrades to solve the problem instead of doing a deep dive into it, even if you give them sufficient information about the problem.

The elite support team responds quickly and gives you higher-level and more professional support, but you have to pay extra for it, on top of the standard fees.

On a scale of one to five, with one being the worst, and five being the best, my rating for Fortinet FortiMail support is a four.

The initial setup for Fortinet FortiMail was complex. It was complex because you have to collect all the right information from the customer, then you need to put it into the equipment as rules, so it's complex. The solution also evolves, and from time to time, you have to fine-tune it to implement the new features and increase the level of security.

I have no information on pricing for the competition because right now, my company is working only with Fortinet, but I can say that in general, the price for Fortinet FortiMail was accepted by the customers easily. The POC is also important when a customer is buying a solution. The customer wants to see how the product runs, and as Fortinet FortiMail is a stable product that runs without big issues, it has a bigger chance of getting chosen by customers over its competitors, even if its price may be a little higher. Pricing for the solution is competitive. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's a little bit higher, but it isn't far from what other solutions charge.

The Fortinet products I have experience with include FortiGate and FortiAnalyzer, and I especially work with Fortinet FortiMail.

My company is a partner and integrator for Fortinet FortiMail.

My rating for Fortinet FortiMail, on a scale of one to ten, is a nine.

The Fabric aspect of the solution is excellent. With it, we have more accuracy in the classification. All the other functions and features on FortiMail are great. I love them all. It's really solid. All of the principal features on the market can be found in this product. 

I love the integration between Fortinet products.

It's easy to set up.

The categorization of the emails, for example, from Brazil, could be better. In the Latin America market, some spam messages use Portuguese language. Some clearly spam messages would be better identified by the anti-spam if not for the language.

I've been using the solution for about five years. 

We have three organizations on the solution. there might be as many as 1,000 people across them. 

The solution is pretty simple to set up. It's fast to deploy. In six hours we can deploy it. If you have experience in access with another component of the company, you will be fine. We did not find it to be complex. 

Typically, we pay for the solution on a yearly basis. I cannot break down exact costs as another area of my organization deals with licensing. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities and its features. 

I primarily just use the product as an email gateway for our email server.

Before I used the solution, I got a lot of spam emails.

The anti-spam and the IPS to help block items and attachments that come with the email are both quite helpful. It can block a lot of fake emails.

The initial setup is easy.

I have found the product to be stable. 

The solution can scale. 

So far I don't need any improvements right now. I'm quite happy with the product as-is.

At some point, FortiMail and Fortigate should merge together in one box. If they did that, it would be really helpful for the user. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

It is, overall, a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable and the performance is good. 

Currently, I'm using it for around 600 to 700 email users. It still performs quite well for me. There is no delay to speak of.

I've never used technical support and have never reached out to them in the past.

I'm also familiar with Cisco. This product is easier to set up than Cisco. 

We found the initial setup process to be very simple. It's not difficult. 

The pricing is very reasonable. It's not overly expensive. We pay a yearly licensing fee. 

I compared quite a few options with Cisco. In the end, this was the cost-effective option and the features are excellent.

We're just customers and end-users.

The version we are using is the newest one, as I already updated the OS and I just bought it last year.

For those considering the solution, they better have a very clear idea about how they will place the FortiMail in their network. For example, either as the email server itself or as the email gateway. If you decided correctly in the first place, then you can configure it easily.

FortiMail has a low cost and high support. Support is very helpful, however, so far, I don't need to use them at all. At the very least, I have someone that I can call and ask questions in Thai. This is not the case, for example, with Cisco. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. I'll rate it higher when it can be easier to configure or connect to the cloud to report on the attachments.