GFI MailEssentials™ - 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.

Text and HTML formats are supported. You can include fields and variables to personalize the disclaimer. You can even create multiple disclaimers and associate them with a user, group or domain.

You can search for a particular email or an entire email thread via the included web interface.

For a complete email archiving solution, please check out GFI MailArchiver™ for Exchange.