There are alternatives to mainstream Windows based tools that can be deployed to combat Spam and email born virus at the entry to an infrastructure.

Using a Linux operating system such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or even its free Fedora derivative are a very suitable choice for this deploy.

MailWatch for MailScanner is a web-based front-end to MailScanner written in PHP, MySQL and JpGraph and is available for free under the terms of the GNU Public License.

It comes with a CustomConfig module for MailScanner which causes MailScanner to log all message data (excluding body text) to a MySQL database which is then queried by MailWatch for reporting and statistics.

Features

* Displays the inbound/outbound mail queue size (currently for Sendmail/Exim users only), Load Average and Today’s Totals for Messages, Spam, Viruses and Blocked Content on each page header.
* Colour-coded display of recently processed mail.
* Drill-down onto each message to see detailed information.
* Quarantine management allows you to release, delete or run sa-learn across any quarantined messages.
* Reports with customisable filters and graphs by JpGraph
* Tools to view Virus Scanner status (currently Sophos only), MySQL database status and to view the MailScanner configuration files.
* Utilites for Sendmail to monitor and display the mail queue sizes and to record and display message relay information.
* Multiple user levels: user, domain and admin that limit the data and features available to each.
* XML-RPC support that allows multiple MailScanner/MailWatch installations to act as one.

MailScanner is an e-mail security and anti-spam package for e-mail gateway systems. It is not designed to be run on Microsoft Windows desktop PCs. Instead, it is designed to be run on mail servers operated by companies and internet service providers (ISPs) so that all their users and customers can be protected from one place. This avoids the need for any software to be installed on individual desktop PCs at all.

The software works with any Unix-based system and is compatible with a wide range of mail transports. It comes with support for any combination of 25 different virus scanner packages, including the free ClamAV scanner, and its design allows the use of multiple virus scanners in parallel to increase the level of security.

Protection against spam is mostly based on the widely acclaimed SpamAssassin package, which again is free and open source. It is supplemented with fast blacklist lookups that can be used to reject a large proportion of messages with minimal overhead.

Protection against malware is provided by a very wide selection of checks and tests, ranging from simple filename rules to content-based file type detection. It also incorporates one of the most sophisticated phishing detectors available anywhere. Many other checks and tests can also be run against messages, far too many to list here.

MailScanner is highly configurable using a very easy-to-use system of rule sets. Virtually every configuration option can, for example, be controlled on a per-user, per-domain or per-IP basis.

MailScanner is extremely easy to integrate into your existing mail transport system, requiring no modification of existing sendmail configurations. Other MTAs require only minor modifications to configuration files, and these are all well documented both online and in the MailScanner book, available direct from the MailScanner web site.

MailScanner is completely free of charge, requiring no licence, installation or subscription fees. Free assistance is provided through mailing lists and instant support is available through a dedicated IRC channel, which is monitored 24 hours per day. A range of companies also provide commercial tailor-made support contracts. It is currently used by a very large selection of organisations around the world, from small companies and ISPs to the US Government and Military.

What kind of hardware do I need?

A Dual Xeon with 2 GB of RAM and 15K SCSI disks can process up to 1.4 million of messages/day (with optimisations).

CCL recommend deploying this solution as a virtual machine using VMware Server and configuring the solution to be a gateway appliance which can scan inbound/outbound email. This mode of deployment allows seamless integration with existing email infrastructures.

Please contact CCL for further information and guidance on costs and process for deployment.