GFI MAX MailProtection

Hosted Email Security and Continuity

GFI MAX MailProtection is a hosted email security and continuity solution that is compatible with any email system and can be implemented in just minutes. GFI MAX MailProtection’s industry-leading technology ensures the optimal filtering of unwanted or harmful messages. At the same time, its customizable management interface and innovative features such as one-click whitelisting, ensure that the solution is both simple to deploy and hassle-free. The cost of this powerful layer of protection is priced at just cents per day based on the number of users, and includes spam filtering, protection against viruses, and a true email continuity service which acts as an ‘always available’ email backup solution.

GFI MAX MailProtection stops spam, viruses, and other email threats before they reach the network or mail server; incoming email is redirected to its fully redundant network and application architecture, which processes messages in real-time via both traditional spam filtering techniques and leading-edge approaches to message analysis including authenticity checks, message fingerprinting, heuristic rule sets, extensive URI databases, real-time message source analysis, and customizable whitelists and blacklists.

The key benefits of GFI MAX MailProtection are:

• Comprehensive and highly accurate spam filtering.
• Zero-hour antivirus protection.
• Rapid deployment and simple ongoing management.
• Business continuity with integrated queuing and on-demand mail service.
• Simple, per-user-per-month pricing structure, with no capital expenditure or start-up costs.
• Compatibility with any email system or operating systems.
• Minimized risks of incorrectly classified messages.
• Substantially greater scalability and reliability than a software or hardware solution dependent on a single device.
• Message logging and search capabilities.
• Responsive and competent technical support.

Features:

Network Defense
Almost all spam and email threats can be blocked before they reach the customer's network - reducing risk, freeing up network bandwidth and easing mail server load.

Continuity
Customers can continue accessing, responding to, and sending email messages, even in the event of an on-premise mail server or network outage; mail is queued by the service, and customers can continue accessing or responding to those messages via the GFI MAX MailProtection control panel, even while their own mail server is off-line.

Zero-Hour Virus Protection
Block new or emerging "zero hour" virus threats before those threats can be detected by traditional signature-based AV solutions.

Inbound Spam Filtering
Improve productivity of servers and employees by reducing the volume of junk mail getting through an existing anti-spam solution.

Outbound Spam Filtering
Prevent inappropriate messages or attachments from being sent from a customer's network or from a specific user, thereby protecting the company’s reputation and alerting administrators as to the presence of any infected workstations or 'zombie' machines, so that those systems can be handled appropriately.

Directory Harvest Attack Prevention
Defend against spammers who attempt to deliver messages to a large number of valid and invalid email addresses at your domain.

Intuitive Web-Based Control Panel
The customizable web-based control panel allows administrators and users to control the service, while providing access to quarantined messages as well as to queued mail in the event of an on-premise mail server failure.

Denial of Service Attack (DoS) Prevention
Prevent email-based DoS attacks by limiting and controlling inbound SMTP traffic from one or more given source IP addresses.

Brandable At All Touch Points including its Web-Based Control Panel
Distributors, partners or customers can consistently promote themselves to their user-base with an easily customizable GUI, which can reflect the desired URL, logo, and color scheme of that organization.  The branding extends beyond the web-based control panel to all end-user touch points, including customizable message digests, notifications, and other communications.

Hosted Individual Junk Mail Quarantines
The service can retain detected spam messages in the control panel outside of the company's network, while allowing each user to access these messages at any time to check for any genuine mail that may have been caught by the spam filters.

Individual Junk Mail Digests
Users can view a convenient, automatically emailed summary of detected spam messages, with a link next to each message to allow the user to identify and release from the quarantine any potential false positives. The digest messages can be scheduled as infrequently as once per week or as frequently as three times per day.

Configurable User Preferences
Administrators can set the spam filtering configuration for a given user, or can delegate the ability to do so to the individual users so that the service works for their specific needs.

Message Logging and Search
Determine the delivery status of an inbound or outbound message, via a message search tool that includes full delivery logs for all messages in the last 10 days.

Platform-Neutral
Works with any operating systems or mail infrastructure including Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, Zimbra, qmail, postfix, sendmail and any other SMTP server.

Benefits:

Benefits for small and medium-size business (SMBs) and end-users:

Email is a critical tool for all organizations. GFI MAX MailProtection delivers comprehensive security and continuity for your email communications.

Easy, Affordable & Risk-free: How GFI MAX MailProtection Benefits Your Business

With GFI MAX MailProtection you can enjoy the following benefits:

• Immediate activation – simply register for better protection and peace of mind.
• No hardware or software to download, install, or maintain.
• Junk mail is blocked before it reaches your network -- reducing risk, network bandwidth and load on the mail server.
• Continuity allows you to continue using email even when your own mail server is down; incoming messages are queued, and you can access and respond to those messages via the GFI MAX MailProtection web interface, at any time and with no prior preparation other than simply using the service.
• Virus outbreaks thwarted by zero-hour antivirus protection – the service can block new or emerging "zero hour" virus threats even before those threats can be detected by traditional signature-based anti-virus engines.
• Better scalability and reliability than a single on-premise solution, through use of multiple systems at multiple datacenters.
• Individual control over quarantines and message digests - Users may access a hosted quarantine or view a convenient, automatically emailed summary of detected spam messages, ensuring that no legitimate messages are lost.
• Highly configurable filtering options enable administrators or users to tune their spam filtering settings if they wish to do so, while allowing other customers to simply "set it and forget it".
• Prevent outbound spam or viruses from being sent from your network - protecting your organization's reputation, while helping to ensure the deliverability of valid mail.
• Outbound email filtering can also quickly alert organizations as to the presence of any infected workstations or 'zombie' machines, so that those systems can be handled appropriately.
• Minimal or no training requirements mean that an organization can be up and running immediately and with ease.
• Support - GFI MAX MailProtection’s customer service team provides responsive support to all customers large and small, from assistance with the initial activation to help with any other questions that may arise, online or by phone, 24/7.

GFI MAX MailProtection can be implemented as your organization’s email security solution, or can be part of a premium hybrid solution in combination with the on-premise GFI MailEssentials/GFI MailSecurity software or other on-premise email security systems. This hybrid solution offers the best of both on-premise and hosted solutions, providing customers with defense in depth, extremely high accuracy in spam detection through multiple complementary technologies, robust virus protection with both zero-hour antivirus protection and up to five signature-based anti-virus engines, local filtering of internal messages combined with multi-stage filtering of inbound and outbound messages, and email continuity to safeguard an organization's mission-critical communications.

Benefits for Partners, IT Support Companies, ISPs & MSPs:

GFI MAX MailProtection allows a wide variety of VARs, MSPs, IT support companies and ISPs to inexpensively deliver high quality hosted anti-spam, anti-virus and email continuity services to end customers.

Easy, Affordable & Risk-free: How GFI MAX MailProtection Benefits Your Business

GFI MAX MailProtection is the only email security service designed from the ground up for partners, with features including native full re-branding and hierarchical management capabilities. The service is easily and inexpensively fully brandable at all end-user touch points, to allow partners of any size to offer the service as an OEM solution.

Partners benefit from a recurring revenue model, and a tiered pricing model that allows partners to achieve very substantial margins. Additionally, there are no quotas or minimum commitments for partners -- just a simple service agreement that allows IT service companies to set up and manage their customers within GFI MAX MailProtection, without intervention.

GFI is committed to its partners and provides marketing support, sales support, and other business development assistance, in addition to unlimited responsive and knowledgeable technical support by both phone and email.

Partners can implement GFI MAX MailProtection remotely and rapidly, with little or no need for ongoing maintenance of the service by the partner or by their customers.

Given the ubiquity of junk mail, the service allows GFI MAX partners to solve their customers' ongoing needs for email security by providing them with an industry-leading hosted solution. The GFI MAX MailProtection service includes a litany of features valued by customers including:

• Highly accurate spam and threat detection, including zero-hour anti-virus defense to block emerging email threats even before they are detected by traditional signature-based anti-virus engines.
• Blocking of email threats before they reach the customer's network - reducing risk, network bandwidth, and mail server load.
• Defense against directory harvest and denial of service attacks.
• Integrated email continuity with automatic queuing of messages and on-demand mail service if or when a customer’s mail server or network connectivity is off-line.
• Hosted individual junk mail quarantines and individual junk mail digest messages.
• Easy-to-use web-based control panel for reporting and management.
• Outbound filtering to block spam or viruses being sent from a customer's network.
• Message logging and search.
• Use of multiple systems at multiple datacenters to provide better scalability and reliability than a single on-premise solution.
• Compatibility with any operating system(s) and any email infrastructure.
• Straightforward and inexpensive pricing, with no capital expenditure or start-up costs.

Partners can implement GFI MAX MailProtection as a multi-layered hosted anti-spam and anti-virus solution, or as part of a premium hybrid solution in combination with on-premise GFI MailEssentials/GFI MailSecurity software or other on-premise email security systems.

This hybrid solution of GFI MAX MailProtection and GFI MailEssentials/GFI MailSecurity software offers the best of both on-premise and cloud-based solutions, providing customers with defense in depth, extremely high accuracy in spam detection through multiple complementary technologies, robust virus protection with both zero-hour antivirus protection and up to five signature-based anti-virus engines, local filtering of internal messages combined with multi-stage filtering of inbound and outbound messages, and email continuity to safeguard an organization's mission-critical communications.

Screenshots:

Click on a thumbnail to see that picture in full size!

Admin Delivery Log	Admin Destination Mail Servers	Admin User list
Admin Whitelist by source IP	User Aggressiveness	User Home Page
User Quarantine	User Quarantine Search	User Status Report
User Whitelist

 

Why GFI MAX MailProtection?:

GFI MAX MailProtection  is a proven, highly effective, and low maintenance hosted email security solution that offers next-generation technology to protect thousands of organizations from junk email and viruses while also providing valuable email continuity.

GFI MAX MailProtection uses a multi-layered approach to spam filtering, combining traditional techniques such as message header analysis and heuristic rules with next-generation technologies such as real-time message source analysis and user-based message profiling. Furthermore, GFI MAX MailProtection enables administrators to-fine tune the aggressiveness of the filter on a per-person, per-group, per-domain, or per-organization basis, according to their needs. Similarly, administrators or users can choose how junk mail should be handled for any particular users or groups; options include Tag and Deliver, Quarantine, Redirect, and Delete.

GFI MAX MailProtection is the ideal solution for your business as it offers numerous advantages compared to other solutions:

• Ease of use. GFI MAX MailProtection was designed with simplicity in mind. Users do not need to install or learn any new software or hardware, nor change the way they use their email – with GFI MAX MailProtection they simply receive virus-free email and dramatically less spam.
• Zero-hour virus protection. Over 90% of viruses are transmitted through email. GFI MAX MailProtection protects an entire organization against fast-moving viruses with a number of defenses including zero-hour antivirus protection– meaning that viruses are detected in the early stage of an outbreak, before they are detected by traditional signature-based antivirus products, thus helping customers avoid the substantial costs of recovering from an email-borne virus infection.
• Continuity. In the event that the customer's mail server is temporarily down or inaccessible, GFI MAX MailProtection provides integrated message queuing as well as on-demand full email service. Customers are able to access and respond to queued messages even while their own mail server is down.
• Support. GFI MAX MailProtection’s customer service team provides responsive 24/7 support to all customers large and small, from assistance with the initial activation to help with any other questions that may arise.
• Advanced features. Organizations can choose to take advantage of GFI MAX MailProtection’s sophisticated features, such as configurable multiple daily digests of detected spam messages, full message search and delivery reports, and much more – or it can simply be left alone to run smoothly without any effort.
• No lost messages. While GFI MAX MailProtection minimizes the chances that a legitimate email message will be flagged as spam, customers can also specify multiple criteria to prevent desired messages from ever being flagged as spam. The aggressiveness of the filter can be tuned company-wide or on a per-user basis, and GFI MAX MailProtection’s automated digest messages provide users with an at-a-glance list of all junk messages caught by the system, with a one-click release mechanism for any legitimate or potentially legitimate mail – assuring that no messages are ever lost.
• Simple pricing. GFI MAX MailProtection uses a simple per-user-per-month pricing model, and allows customers to evaluate the service with a no-risk, fully functional free trial.

With GFI MAX MailProtection’s proven track record,comprehensive and highly accurate spam and virus filtering, guaranteed service-level agreement, and integrated email continuity, customers can depend on GFI MAX MailProtection for true messaging security.

How it works:

Infrastructure

At GFI Software, we have invested significantly in developing a reliable, stable, and scalable hosted mail protection service that is hands-free and trouble-free for our customers. The GFI MAX MailProtection software architecture is designed for high availability and our network spans multiple, geographically distributed datacenters as the foundation for our services. Significant attention is paid to the many components affecting the reliability and scalability of GFI MAX MailProtection including its network, systems and software architecture.

Network Architecture

GFI MAX MailProtection’s distributed network architecture uses multiple datacenters. For maximum reliability, the datacenters have diversified management, regional power sources, and network peering arrangements.  Each location features a Cisco-based, fault-tolerant network with redundant Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to multiple Tier 1 backbone providers.

Hosting Environment

Each carrier-grade datacenter chosen by GFI meets stringent requirements including multiple power feeds from redundant power sources, continuously online UPS systems, redundant climate control, 24x7 manned guard stations, and institutional banking quality access procedures. All have emergency diesel generators with ample fuel on-site as well as negotiated arrangements for priority refuelling in the event of an extended utility power outage.

Redundant Parallel Systems

The GFI MAX MailProtection architecture is modular and comprised of load balancers, front-end message processing servers, back-end filtering systems, supervisor modules and database servers. All of these systems - from the front-end load balancers to the back-end database servers - are redundant and running in parallel.  Additionally, the application is designed for geographic diversity, with distributed logging and processing across multiple datacenters.

Proven Software

Engineered to scale with the rapid growth of junk mail, the software used for GFI MAX MailProtection is purpose-built and highly optimized. The third-generation software design uses modular scanning techniques for maximum flexibility and includes an adaptive system to detect emerging junk mail.  The software is designed to avoid unnecessary use of disk at all opportunities, and through a variety of innovative techniques, can provide faster message processing, greater scalability and flexibility than traditional approaches to spam detection. The software has been proven through the processing of billions of messages for customers.

Monitoring

Each network component and each system within the GFI MAX MailProtection service is continuously tested at the network-level and/or service-level by redundant monitoring systems. Furthermore, 24x7 full-path message monitoring tests real-world system performance across the application.

Management

GFI MAX MailProtection’s management capabilities allow for fine-grained control over the handling of email threats, while requiring minimal or no time commitments from technical staff or email users.

Administrators can use the service's easy-to-navigate web-based interface to manage a broad range of options related to the service, including parameters for inbound and outbound filtering, user management, message search, delivery logs, and statistical reporting. Administrators can apply configuration settings to a single user, a group of users, an entire domain, or multiple domains across an organization. While there is substantial flexibility in the configuration of the system for administrators who choose to take an active role in maintaining the service, the service is designed to work with little or no such management.

The same philosophy is true for end-users. At the discretion of system administrators, email users may access various functions of the management interface, such as their searchable junk mail quarantines, or their message queues in the event that their primary mail server is offline. That said, GFI MAX MailProtection is designed to minimize the need for changes to end user behavior. Users are not required to log into the interface, and instead can simply use features such as GFI MAX MailProtection’s one-click whitelisting, summary digests, and selective tagging in order to manage their junk mail from their desktop.

Seamless integration

Ongoing management requirements are further simplified by GFI MAX MailProtection’s seamless integration with a wide variety of email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and many others. With secure and automated account synchronization via LDAP/LDAPS or other methods, GFI MAX MailProtection relieves system administrators from having to maintain user data in multiple locations. And with a modular web services-based API, organizations can manage their email security from virtually any application.

Message Handling

GFI MAX MailProtection offers several options for handling of detected junk which can be established globally across one or more domains, or for one or more individual users, and which can be changed at any time. Customers can choose to:

• Drop detected spam – an aggressive approach that reduces a customer’s network bandwidth requirements and mail server load. Due to GFI MAX MailProtection’s extremely low percentage of false positives (legitimate email wrongly classified as spam), it is very rare that a legitimate email message will be dropped.
• Tag and forward detected spam – with a modified subject line, incoming email can be automatically directed to a specific folder in each user’s email program for periodic review and/or deletion.
• Redirect detected spam - junk mail can be directed to an alternative address, e.g., spam@example.com
• Quarantine - junk messages are redirected to individual web-mail quarantine accounts that can be reviewed at any time by end users. The most common choice of larger businesses and ISPs, this approach reduces bandwidth requirements and mail server load for customers while providing complete assurance that no legitimate message will ever be lost.

Message Digests

Customers can opt to receive periodic message digests, which provide each user a summary list of the junk email received for them.  Digests can be sent as infrequently as once per week, or as frequently as several times per day, at times defined by the customer.  Each digest includes a means to immediately release each message from the quarantine in case it is or may be legitimate, providing reassurance that no valid mail is being detected as spam.

Messaging Analysis

GFI MAX MailProtection uses a combination of techniques for spam and message analysis. While generally no single element will by itself classify a message as spam, the use of multiple methods in conjunction with each other reduces the number of false positives compared to other approaches to spam detection.

GFI MAX MailProtection continually refines its message analysis techniques, with a focus on adaptive technologies to detect evolving spam patterns.  GFI MAX MailProtection incorporates techniques such as:

• Authenticity Checks including detailed header analysis, SMTP conversation details, message encoding and formatting, etc.,
• Message Fingerprinting to compare email signatures to frequently-updated public and internal databases of known spam messages.
• An extensive, continually updated Heuristic Rule Set that encompasses message headers, body text, and other characteristics of both English and non-English language messages.
• Public and Private Blacklists of mail servers, relays, or networks known to be used by spammers.
• Extensive URI Databases of unique elements such as URLs, phone numbers, and physical addresses known to be used by spammers.
• Incorporation of Domain History and Reputation to increase the accuracy of blacklists and URI databases.
• Real-Time Message Source Analysis to assess whether an increased volume of mail flow is simply a legitimate high-volume mailing, or the result of a spammer hijacking or the use of a ‘zombie’ network.
• Dynamic Feedback-Based Rules Optimization to leverage feedback from thousands of GFI MAX MailProtection service users, as well as from many monitored legitimate and ‘spam trap’ email addresses.
• User-Based Message Profiling that allows for refinement of message scoring for each user based on a history of his or her message traffic.
• Customizable whitelists and blacklists which can be applied on an account-wide, organization-wide, domain-wide, or user-specific basis.

Working together, these elements accurately detect a very high percentage of spam, phishing emails, and other unwanted messages – while minimizing the chances of a legitimate message being detected as spam.

True continuity

GFI MAX MailProtection provides organizations with peace of mind regarding their email via an integrated continuity service.

In the event that the customer's mail server is temporarily down or inaccessible, GFI MAX MailProtection acts as a message queue. No messages are lost, and people who send email to that organization don’t receive error messages; GFI MAX MailProtection simply stores those messages and delivers them once the customer’s mail server is back online. It uses a timing algorithm to deliver queued messages to ensure that the customer’s mail server is not overwhelmed with a sudden barrage of queued messages once the server is back up and running.

More importantly, customers can access and respond to any queued messages via the GFI MAX MailProtection control panel - allowing customers to continue their business-critical email communications even when their own mail infrastructure is off-line. This on-demand, full-fledged backup mail service is available at any time, without the need for customers to invest in hardware or software or to make any advance preparations other than normal use of the service.

With these features, GFI Software provides companies with true email continuity under circumstances ranging from a brief, planned mail server upgrade, to a major network outage caused by a natural disaster.

GFI MAX MailProtection FAQs:

What is the difference between GFI MAX MailProtection and GFI MAX MailEdge?

GFI MAX MailProtection is a comprehensive hosted email security and email continuity solution. GFI MAX MailEdge is designed to be used in conjunction with an existing on-premise ant-spam/antivirus software or hardware solution, where it provides frontline email defense by blocking most unwanted email traffic before this reaches the mail server, coupled with email continuity.

Implementation

What is involved in implementing the GFI MAX MailProtection service?

All that is necessary is a change in your DNS records, so that the 'MX' (mail exchanger) entries for your domain point to GFI MAX MailProtection's systems. After that change has been made, your email will be redirected through GFI MAX MailProtection’s filters before being automatically delivered to your mail server.

What is an MX record?

A mail exchanger (MX) record identifies the location of a domain’s mail server. The record directs computers on the Internet where to send email for a specific domain. Unfortunately, the record also informs spammers of the location of a domain’s mail server. By changing the MX record, a company can re-route its inbound email to GFI MAX MailProtection, which filters messages for spam and viruses and then delivers the clean email to the company’s mail server.

Is there any downtime necessary to implement GFI MAX MailProtection's service?

There is no downtime involved in implementing GFI MAX MailProtection. The set-up process is fast, and does not affect or delay your inbound or outbound email.

How soon will we start seeing results?

Typically, GFI MAX MailProtection begins working within a few hours of the DNS change, and often within a few minutes for a significant percentage of your inbound email. In order for all of your inbound messages to be filtered, the changes to your domain's MX record must fully propagate through the Internet. The (TTL) setting within your domain’s DNS specifies how quickly these changes should take effect; TTL values generally range from one hour to 24 hours. There is no interruption to your mail flow during any of this time.

Reliability and Server Back-Up

How reliable is GFI MAX MailProtection?

GFI MAX MailProtection's network and software architecture have been designed to handle both the rapidly growing volume of email and the heavy peak loads that are characteristic of SMTP traffic. GFI MAX MailProtection leverages multiple datacenters and has no single point of failure.  GFI also provides guarantees uptime via a service level agreement that is part of all customer agreements.

Will we experience delays in receiving messages?

No. GFI MAX MailProtection typically processes a message in less than a second. Customers do not notice any delays in the delivery of email.

What happens if our mail server goes down?

In the event that a customer's mail server is inaccessible, the GFI MAX MailProtection system acts as a message queue so that emails will be delivered to the customer once the mail server is back online. GFI MAX MailProtection uses a timing algorithm to gracefully deliver those queued messages, to ensure that the customer’s mail server is not overwhelmed with a sudden barrage of inbound mail.

Additionally, the service includes full email continuity, so that customers can access and respond to any messages in queue, via the GFI MAX MailProtection web interface.  With this capability, customers can continue using email even in the event of an emergency affecting their own email systems.

Security

How secure is the privacy of my email?

The GFI MAX MailProtection service does not affect your email's security. First of all, email itself is inherently not secure. Email messages are sent in clear, unencrypted plain text format across many networks and often through multiple mail servers before arriving at their destination. Essentially, GFI MAX MailProtection's service represents only an additional 'hop' on the Internet before email is delivered to a company's mail server.

GFI MAX MailProtection does not store or make copies of email messages, other than for a short period of time (i.e., for the length that a message may be stored in quarantine or queue).  Additionally, there are stringent security measures in place to prevent any unauthorized physical or electronic access to the GFI MAX MailProtection systems.

Spam Detection and Handling

How does GFI MAX MailProtection determine which messages are spam?

GFI MAX MailProtection employs an extensive range of tests on incoming messages to detect spam. These include traditional, widely used approaches for spam detection such as message authenticity checks, header analysis, message signature analysis, databases of domain names and addresses used by spammers, and whitelists and blacklists. GFI MAX MailProtection also incorporates advanced, industry-leading proprietary techniques such as real-time message source analysis, graphics analysis, and user-based message profiling.

What happens to messages that are detected as spam?

You have several options for handling the spam messages detected by GFI MAX MailProtection. Junk messages can be (1) redirected to a GFI MAX MailProtection-hosted quarantine, (2) redirected to an alternative email address such as spam@yourcompany.com, (3) identified as spam in the subject line and delivered to the intended recipient, or (4) deleted. These options can be configured company-wide or on a per-user basis, and can be changed at any time.

What percentage of junk email does GFI MAX MailProtection catch?

The detection rate varies by customer and is based on the email traffic patterns for a given domain, and on GFI MAX MailProtection’s aggressiveness for that domain (customers can configure how aggressive the filter should be). On average, GFI MAX MailProtection blocks over 98% of junk email and 100% of email-borne viruses.

What are whitelists and blacklists?

Whitelists are rules that allow messages to be delivered based on their 'from' email address or domain name, regardless of content. If you would like to guarantee that all messages from yourcustomer.com, for example, will not be flagged as spam regardless of what those messages contain, you can simply add that domain to your whitelist. Conversely, blacklists are rules that block messages based on the domain name or email address of the sender.  Whitelists and blacklists can also be based on the source IP address of the sending mail server, the subject line of the message, or other characteristics of the message.

Virus Detection

Is GFI MAX MailProtection a substitute for our current anti-virus software?

We do not recommend that customers eliminate their current virus protection, because viruses can be spread through means other than email. That said, over 90% of viruses are transmitted through email. As viruses have become more prevalent and more damaging, organizations increasingly are complementing their existing server- and workstation-based security with another layer of protection at their Internet gateway (as GFI MAX MailProtection provides) as an additional defense.

How often are GFI MAX MailProtection’s anti-virus definitions updated?

GFI MAX MailProtection’s anti-virus definitions are updated in near real-time. These frequent updates can protect an organization against fast-moving viruses that may not be caught with an internal anti-virus solution.  Additionally, GFI MAX MailProtection incorporates a zero-hour antivirus solution that can detect email threats at the time of an initial outbreak, before those threats can be detected by traditional signature-based antivirus engines.

Compatibility

Does GFI MAX MailProtection work with Lotus Notes?

Yes. GFI MAX MailProtection works seamlessly with any mail server that you are using. As a managed service, GFI MAX MailProtection is compatible with widely used programs such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and Lotus Notes, as well as any other mail server software.

Does GFI MAX MailProtection support Macintosh, Linux, or Unix environments?

Yes. GFI MAX MailProtection is a service rather than a product, and no software needs to be installed on your mail server or at workstations. Therefore, GFI MAX MailProtection supports any mail server, any email client, and any operating system(s) in use at a given organization.

If my company hosts email at an external provider, will GFI MAX MailProtection work?

Yes. Many companies use an externally hosted email server, in addition to or in lieu of an internal mail server. GFI MAX MailProtection works correctly regardless of where a company's mail server or servers are located.

Integration

Do we need to integrate GFI MAX MailProtection with our existing mail server?

No - GFI MAX MailProtection will work successfully without any changes to an organization’s existing mail infrastructure and without any integration with that mail infrastructure. For ISPs and enterprise customers, we recommend that GFI MAX MailProtection’s user management and authentication functions be integrated with the customer’s infrastructure to reduce the need for any ongoing management of email accounts.

What options for integration does GFI MAX MailProtection provide?

GFI MAX MailProtection has been architected to integrate seamlessly with a wide array of infrastructures. This ensures that email addresses, aliases, and authentication information can be automatically synchronized between GFI MAX MailProtection and an organization’s internal system(s). In addition to integration via standard protocols such as LDAP and LDAPS, GFI MAX MailProtection offers a web service (available Q1 2010) that allows for programmatic domain and user management from virtually any application.

Are there any extra charges for integration?

No. GFI MAX MailProtection views integration as a means to ensure ongoing ease of management for customers, and all features related to integration are included in the standard pricing for the service.

Billing

Are there any set-up fees or implementation costs?

No. Since GFI MAX MailProtection is a managed service, there is no hardware or software to purchase and no one-time fees. There is simply a per-user price, based on the number of users who are enrolled for filtering.

How is my organization billed?

GFI MAX MailProtection is a subscription service. Customers generally are billed monthly, with pricing based on the number of email accounts using the service.

Do I have to pay for aliases?

No. Alias accounts are filtered for spam and viruses, but they are not billed.