No matter what size your business or what type of computers you use, you most likely deal with a large amount of Spam.  If you are running Microsoft Windows PCs, you also have to deal with viruses.  For small businesses, spam can be an annoying time waster.  For large companies, the amount of bandwidth, storage and processing devoted to spam can substantially affect the bottom line.  Viruses can lead to lost data, more wasted bandwidth and even embarrasing and costly disclosures of Personally Identifiable Information.

You can help protect yourself while reducing costs by implementing a Spam and Virus Filtering Gateway.

How it works:

At the heart of Internet Email is SMTP (the Simple Mail Transport Protocol.)  A Spam and Virus filtering Gateway sits between your Firewall and your Internal Mail Server, stopping spam and viruses before they reach your mail server.

When a spammer tries to send you some spam, they will connect to your gateway, usually from a virus-infected machine known as a spambot owned by an innocent third party.  The gateway will look up the sender's IP address in a list of known spamming addresses and immediately reject the connection if it is found.  This will stop 60-70% of all spam before it wastes more than a few hundred bytes of your bandwidth.

Next, the gateway will compare the SMTP Envelope Recipient address with a list of valid addresses for your organization.  Many spammers send their spam shotgun-style to a list of names (Aaron, Amy, Andrew, Bill Bob,etc), in the hopes that some will match users in your organization.  By rejecting these messages now, no more bandwidth, storage or processing is needed for messages that can not be delivered anyway.  The gateway can get your list of valid names from any combination of a Microsoft Active Directory, another LDAP Database, an SQL database or static text files.

Once a message has passed these checks, it will be processed by SpamAssassin.  SpamAssassin has a variety of tools in it's arsenal.  It can check links against databases of known spamming sites, check DomainKeys and SenderID information, compare messages to known spam messages in distributed spam databases such as Vipul's Razor, Pyzor and DCC, and perform a variety of other Header and Body Checks.  SpamAssassin also has a Bayesian filter that automatically learns and adapts to new spamming methods.  Users can have their own SpamAssassin RuleSets, Whitelists and Blacklists.  These per-user preferences can be stored in your Microsoft Active Directory, another LDAP Database, an SQL database or static text files.  If a message has been determined to be spam, SpamAssassin can either modify the subject and/or headers, quarantine the message or discard it.

Next comes virus scanning.  The gateway can use a combination of almost all free and commercial virus scanning applications.  By default it is configured to use the free open-source ClamAV scanner.  ClamAV is an excellent scanner for an email gateway with an actively maintained database of fresh virus signatures.  Again, viruses can either be tagged, quarantined or discarded.

Once all these checks have been perfomed and a message has passed, it will be handed off to your internal email server.  You should notice a dramatic decrease in spam, bandwidth utilization, storage and processing costs.

Certain industries are subject to strict document retention rules that require organizations to archive all mail.  Using this gateway, you can have all incoming and outgoing mail archived in a seperate mailbox.

For more information or to request a custom quote, call Russell Consultants Toll Free at (866) 269-7862.