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E-mail is the life blood for business, the tool that almost everyone needs, and because it is so pervasive, it is a great target for all kinds of internet criminals, and scammers. My personal mailbox was loaded from vacation offers to a plethora of other junk. It was difficult to locate legitimate business e-mail.
To make matters worse, I would receive notices that my credit card at my bank might have been compromised, and the realistic looking e-mail from my bank asking me to confirm my personal details would lead me to a fake website. That’s called Phishing, and is a popular tool of Cyber-Criminals. It really can be a hostile place in E-mail land.
Since we have our own company Exchange Server for dishing up our e-mail, I turned to the pros at GFI for a solution. The good folks at GFI suggested we try the MailEssentials product.
MailEssentials is a server product that can be installed on either your mail server or SMTP gateway server. It includes both easy to use configuration tool, a monitoring tool, and report tool. It took less than 30 minutes to install and do a basic configuration of the product before MailEssentials went to work.
GFiMailEssentials stops spam cold by employing multiple tactics. The first method is a Bayesian filter. The best way to describe it is say it is a smart filter that learns by watching your out going e-mail to learn what is “good” e-mail, (Ham as GFi calls it) and a spam database that is automatically updated. As soon as you have about 2500 Ham e-mails, you can turn on the filter and let MailEssentials go to work.
Another method of spam detection is header analysis & keyword checking. GFI MailEssentials intelligently analyzes the email header and identifies spam based on message field information. It detects forged headers, encoded IPs, spam mutation, spam sent from invalid domains, and more. It also enables you to configure keywords to check for spam using keyword checking.
GFiMailEssentials also employs 3rd party DNS blacklists (DNSBL) checking. GFI MailEssentials supports DNS blacklists (real time black hole lists), which are databases of known spammers. If the sending mail server is on one of those lists, it marks the email as spam. GFI MailEssentials supports popular third party blacklists such as ORDB, SpamHaus, Spamcop and also enables administrators to configure custom RBL servers.
Blacklists and Whitelists are important weapons in war on spam. A DNS blacklist is employed that flags known spammers IP addresses, and flags the e-mail as spam. GFI MailEssentials supports popular third party blacklists such as ORDB, SpamHaus, Spamcop and also enables administrators to configure custom RBL servers.
Whitelisting a sender ensures that the senders e-mail won’t be flagged as spam. Before we used GFiMailEssentials, we relied on he built in Outlook Junk mail filter, that would routinely give false positives, but adding a sender to the whitelist the e-mail is no longer marked as junk.
Spammers often try to guess recipient addresses by generating multiple random email addresses at a domain; they then send their spam mail to all those addresses. GFI MailEssentials checks the validity of ALL the email addresses included in the mail sent, either via a query to Active Directory or through support for LDAP, and if they are not all valid, marks the mail as spam.
Anti-Phishing is a huge plus for the software. GFI MailEssentials’ anti-phishing module detects and blocks threats posed by phishing emails by comparing the content of the scam with a constantly updated database of blacklisted mails, thereby ensuring all the latest phishing emails are captured. As extra protection, it also looks for typical phishing keywords in every email sent to your organization.
Once Spam or Phishing is detected, the software by default, will insert the following in the e-mail subject line [SPAM] or [PHISHING] .You can also direct those e-mails to go directly to the Junk folder, or even a public Exchange Server folder.. There are almost too many options to mention them all here.
The monitor tool can run either on the server or remote workstation, and gives the user the ability to view each e-mail transaction as it is processed by GFi Mail Essentials. MailEssentials also can archive all inbound and outbound e-mail to either a SQL server database or Access database, which is extremely important for the Sarbane-Oxley Act, and HIPPA compliance as well. And because e-mails are archived in a database, you reduce you’re the size of your exchange server stores.
GFi also offers a anti virus, anti Trojan tool that works with MailEssentials called GFi MailSecurity, and you can combine the products to form a e-mail server suite. GFiMailEssentials also includes, a POP3 connector, a Mail List Server (which is a huge savings in and of itself). You just get a lot of bank for the buck with this powerful tool. At a price of around $450 to protect 25 mailboxes, you can’t find a better product. That comes to less than 20 bucks per mailbox!
We at FrugalBrothers swear by this product, and even decided to add it as a product that we sell and support. I am more than too happy to demo the product via web based meeting by calling me (260)724-2748 or e-mail me at
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
if your interested in a free demo trial of GFiMailEssentials. Now the only Spam we see today is those little blue cans at the grocery store
Special thanks to GFi Software for providing technical details of MailEssentials technology, and contributing material for this article.
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