Features

Due to frequent updates, SpamRazer needs no tweaking to be fully effective in filtering the latest spam attacks. Not only will administrators benefit from out-of-the-box filtering but they will also gain protection from each new attack without the need to tweak GFI MailEssentials. With SpamRazer filtering, greylisting, IP reputation filtering, Bayesian filtering and other advanced anti-spam technologies, our spam capture rate is over 99%. GFI MailEssentials also has an enviable low rate of false positives ensuring the safe delivery of important emails.

The administrator can also select to send a spam digest with information on quarantined emails. From the spam digest, users can review their spam emails, and approve them as required. The administrator is allowed full access to the quarantined emails.

The Botnet/Zombie check, in GFI MailEssentials, eliminates hard to catch attachment spam such as image spam, PDF spam, Excel and ZIP spam. The attachment spam check filters this attachment spam quickly, efficiently and with a very low rate of false-positives. GFI MailEssentials uses two anti-spam filter engines and a variety of technologies such as greylisting and IP reputation filtering.

Click here to read more about attachment spam

Click here to learn more about NDR spam

GFI’s Bayesian filter has a tremendous advantage over other spam solutions that only check for keywords or rely on downloading signatures of known spam as it uses an advanced mathematical formula coupled with a dataset that is custom-made for your installation: Spam data is continuously updated by GFI and is automatically downloaded by GFI MailEssentials, whereas the ham data is automatically collected from your own outbound mail. This means that the Bayesian filter is constantly learning new spam tricks; spammers cannot circumvent the dataset used. This results in an exceptionally high spam detection rate, after the required automated two-week learning period. In short, Bayesian filtering has the following advantages:

• Looks at the whole spam message, not just keywords or known spam signatures
• Learns from your outbound email and therefore greatly reduces false positives
• Adapts itself over time by learning about new spam and new valid emails
• Dataset is unique to your company, making it impossible to bypass
• Multilingual and international

Read More about Bayesian Filtering

As extra protection, it also looks for typical phishing keywords in every email sent to your organization.

Read More about Phishing

However, until now, list servers have been expensive and difficult to administer and they did not integrate with Exchange Server. GFI MailEssentials integrates with Exchange and can use Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server as the backend. Both newsletter lists and discussion lists are supported.

This gives users more control and reduces administration. Administrators can control access to this feature through the use of Public Folder security.

If the sending mail server is on one of those lists, it marks the email as spam. GFI MailEssentials supports popular third party blocklists, such as SpamHaus and Spamcop, and also enables administrators to configure custom RBL servers.

GFI MailEssentials includes a patent-pending automatic Whitelist management tool, which adds outgoing mail recipients to your Whitelist. This greatly reduces false positives without any need for additional administration. Whitelists can also be built based on domain names, email addresses and keywords.

If GFI MailEssentials does not identify an email as spam and yet it is not on the Whitelist, then the New Senders module can move that email to a user's subfolder, for example, Inbox – New Senders.

You can report on the amount of spam filtered and on rules which caught most spam. You can also generate reports on user, domain and mail server usage.

It installs on the Exchange SMTP service and does not require gateway configuration. It also works with Exchange 5.5/2000, Lotus Domino and other popular SMTP/POP3 servers via the SMTP protocol.

Using multiple scanners drastically reduces the average time required to obtain the latest virus signature, enabling a faster response to combat the latest threats. Each antivirus software engine has a different response time to each new virus, depending on where the virus was discovered, and other factors. By using multiple antivirus engines, GFI MailSecurity gives you a much better chance of having the right defense, at the right moment, to combat the latest attack. Since each engine has its own heuristics and detection methods, each one brings its own strength to your email environment for detecting a particular virus and its variants. Multiple antivirus engines, as provided by GFI MailSecurity, mean better virus protection.

Norman Virus Control is an industrial strength antivirus engine that has received the 100% Virus Bulletin award over 30 times running. BitDefender is a very fast and flexible award-winning antivirus engine that can recognize and scan a strikingly wide range of formats. GFI MailSecurity automatically checks and updates the Norman Virus Control and BitDefender definition files as they become available. The GFI MailSecurity price includes updates for one year.

One of the best ways to detect the most recent malware, for which definitions have yet to be released, is to run it in a Sandbox. GFI MailSecurity features Norman Sandbox, a technology which makes use of an emulated environment to analyze the behavior of suspicious files in cases where signature-based analysis falls short. Additionally, for those also using the optional AVG antivirus, GFI MailSecurity uses the AVG LinkScanner to analyze hyperlinks in email bodies to determine whether they point to malicious content. The AVG LinkScanner can also be configured to scan the links’ destination pages.

For example, GFI MailSecurity would have protected you against the Nimda and Klez viruses when they first emerged, without requiring an antivirus update, because they used known exploits.

For example, all executable attachments can be quarantined for administrator review before they are distributed to the user. GFI MailSecurity will scan for information leaks such as an employee emailing a database. You can also choose to delete attachments like .mp3 or .mpg files. The administrator can configure GFI MailSecurity to block certain attachments only if they exceed a specific size and to strip suspicious attachments from the email before sending it to the user.

From trend reports for management (ROI) to daily drill-down reports for technical staff; the GFI MailSecurity ReportPack provides you with a comprehensive and easy-to-view understanding of your security patterns. Full automation and custom scheduling provide install-it-and-forget-it-functionality. The GFI MailSecurity ReportPack offers several default and customizable reports that can be prepared on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis including:

• Viruses blocked
• Inbound email traffic
• Outbound email traffic
• Total inbound and outbound email traffic
• Processed emails
• Blocked emails
• And more

More Information about the GFI MailSecurity ReportPack

For example, you can set up a folder for emails that were quarantined by virus checking and another for emails quarantined by attachment checking for a particular user, thus allowing you to prioritize. For example, it may be more important in your environment to examine the attachment checking folder first, allowing you to quickly approve and forward those emails that are appropriate.

For example, you can search among in or outbound email to or from a particular user. Searches can be carried out based on sender, recipient, the reason for quarantine and more, freeing the administrator from the tedious task of sifting through a folder full of email, one-by-one.