GFI MailEssentials

SpamRazer is a powerful anti-spam engine that has been designed for ease-of-use.

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.

Greylisting is an anti-spam technique used to identify spam emails originating from non-RFC compliant mail servers (which are often utilized by spammers).

For each new SMTP transmission, GFI MailEssentials records the sender, recipient and sending mail server’s IP address (aka triplet) and rejects any emails with a temporary failure message. Compliant email servers try and resend the message after a few minutes – this causes their triplet to be confirmed and connections with the same triplet are no longer rejected. Non-compliant mail servers do not try to resend the message.

The administrator can select to quarantine spam emails. Spam emails are stored in a database and are automatically deleted after a pre-defined period of time. 

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.

GFI MailEssentials also ships with a precise, real-time dashboard that gives administrators a graphic view of the software’s status as well as the server’s email flow.

Components shown on the dashboard are: status of key services provided by GFI MailEssentials, statistics of email flow, blocked spam and, POP2Exchange logging and results which can be filtered by sender, recipient, subject, etc.

Administrators can select to log occurrences (such as blocked or whitelisted mail) and configure to start a new log file after a pre-defined period of time or at a specific size.

Administrators can now send a daily report to the users that shows how many emails he or she received and how many emails, identified as spam, were filtered.

A snapshot of email traffic will show the end-user how much spam email was successfully captured. The report gives a full list of those emails identified and filtered.

With spammers controlling tens of thousands of zombie machines, these large botnet armies have become one of the leading sources of spam.

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.

GFI MailEssentials also supports Unicode.

This means that GFI MailEssentials supports the industry standard for universal character encoding. This update GFI MailEssentials to process emails in any language, and ensures that all characters are rendered properly.

GFI MailEssentials is available in Russian, Spanish, Italian and German. Localization gives users the ability to install and run GFI MailEssentials in their native language.

GFI MailEssentials is server-based and installs on the mail server or at the gateway, eliminating the deployment and administrative hassle of desktop-based anti-spam and anti-phishing products.

A server-side solution will prevent your server message stores from filling up with spam and eliminate the need to train your users on the creation and update of anti-spam rules.

Bayesian filtering, which uses a mathematical approach based on known spam and ham, is an effective way to catch 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

GFI MailEssentials can download updates to the Bayesian spam profile database from the GFI site, ensuring that it recognizes the latest spam and spamming techniques.

GFI maintains the spam profile database by working with a number of spam collection organizations that continually supply spam samples.

GFI MailEssentials’ anti-phishing module detects and blocks threats posed by phishing emails by comparing the content of the spam with a constantly updated database of phishing URLs, 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.

GFI MailEssentials gives you the flexibility to choose what to do with spam.

You can delete it, move it to a folder, forward the spam mail to a public email address or folder, quarantine it or send it to individual customizable folders (for example, a junk mail folder) in the end-users' inboxes. You can also select multiple actions as required. This allows you to sort spam and to easily review mail that has been flagged as spam.

A list server is the best method for distributing company newsletters, since it automates the process of allowing users to subscribe and unsubscribe (required by anti-spam regulations).

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.

Administrators can easily tune the Bayesian engine by dragging and dropping spam or ham to the appropriate public folder.

GFI MailEssentials learns from the spam and ham that it picks up from these folders and further improves its spam detection rate. Administrators can control access to this feature through the use of Public Folder security.

GFI MailEssentials allows users to Whitelist or Blocklist senders simply by dragging and dropping the appropriate mail to a public folder.

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

GFI MailEssentials intelligently analyzes the email headers and disclaimers 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.

GFI MailEssentials supports DNS blocklists (real time blocklists), 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 blocklists, such as SpamHaus and Spamcop, and also enables administrators to configure custom RBL servers.

GFI MailEssentials checks links in emails against URI DNS Blocklists. Administrators can configure multiple URI DNSBLs, add their own and also define priorities for which server should be checked first.

Whitelists enable you to ensure that email from particular senders or domains are never flagged as spam, permitting more stringent anti-spam rules.

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.

The disclaimers can be automatically tailored for the sender of the message by including information about the sender. Administrators can select to include information about the sender from Active Directory.

The New Senders feature provides users with an instant view of emails sent from people with whom they have not had previous contact, thereby helping users to better organize emails in their email client.

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.

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. Directory Harvesting can optionally be done at the initial stage of the SMTP transmission, thus eliminating any traffic that is generated by this type of spam.

The database-driven reporting engine allows you to create advanced reports on your inbound and outbound email.

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.

As most of today’s spammers spoof email addresses, it is important to be able to check whether an email is genuine or if it has been sent from a forged sending address.

This can be done via the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which allows users to test whether a particular email originates from its claimed source. The GFI MailEssentials SPF module automatically checks whether the mail from a particular company was actually sent by its registered mail servers.

You can configure which method of capturing spam is to be given priority and create your own hierarchical list. For example, the administrator can select for our whitelisting anti-spam feature to be applied first to all incoming mail, then Bayesian scanning, and so on.

A list server is useful for distributing company newsletters, automating the process of allowing users to subscribe and unsubscribe (required by anti-spam regulations).

However, list servers have traditionally been expensive and difficult to administer and few integrated 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.

GFI MailEssentials enables you to add disclaimers to the top or bottom of an email.

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.

The email monitoring feature enables you to keep a central store of the email communications for a particular person or department. By configuring email to be copied to an email address, all email can be stored in an Exchange or Outlook store, making searching much easier.

GFI MailEssentials can archive all inbound and outbound mail to a Microsoft SQL Server database.

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

GFI MailEssentials integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange 2003/2007/2010.

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.

Get antivirus, email content checking and anti-trojan protection for your mail server with the GFI MailDefense Suite™.

GFI MailSecurity™ for Exchange/SMTP is an email content checking, exploit detection, threats analysis and antivirus solution that removes various types of email-borne threats before they can affect your email users.

Organizations that are currently using or plan to use virtualization on their network can still install and use a range of GFI products with confidence.

GFI MailEssentials supports and runs on the most common virtualization technologies in use, namely VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Hyper-V.