Using Anti Spam and Anti virus services to protect your business email - By: backupvault2 backupvault2

Business emails are important documents containing critical information. Like any other email, they are likely to be infected with email virus. An ordinary email when infected may be mundane enough to be deleted, but not so the business messages. Many antivirus software delete the infected email when unable to clean it. Such packages if employed at company’s server and workstations may not work to your satisfaction. Also any laxity in updating the antivirus may leave a loophole for some virus to sneak in. It is always better to prevent viruses from entering your system than to allow them to come in and then curing the infected mails. Preventing spam by setting up in-house solutions is difficult, requiring a sizable capital outlay in the form of hardware/software, costly expertise and regular maintenance/upgradation. Even then it may not be effective enough to satisfy you.

Remotely hosted services are available which offer both anti virus and anti spam solution to business houses. All incoming emails to the client are diverted to the service provider’s center. These are cost-effective in terms of money, time and bandwidth, easy to implement, highly effective and reliable. They employ a variety of filters to clean emails of spam and virus before forwarding them to the client’s server. Attachment Filters block malicious executable attachments as well as clean them of viruses and malware. Other filters like IP Reputation Filters, heuristic and pattern-recognition (Bayesian) Filters eliminate spam. Perhaps the strongest plus point in favor of such services is the service providers’ ability to quickly react to new threats by using multiple filters.

Setup for a hosted filtering service is done by changing the client’s MX records to point to the provider’s servers so that all incoming mail of the client passes through their filters. Every domain on the Internet has a DNS (domain name system) server that resolves the domain name into its corresponding IP address. The DNS server contains all the IP addresses of your domain’s Web site along with a mail exchanger (MX) record for a domain, containing the IP address of your domain’s mail server. This MX record for the client’s domain is modified to contain the IP address of the filtering company’s server. So, all messages to email addresses in the client’s domain is diverted to the filtering company. As the IP address of the client’s mail server is known by the provider, all mail after filtering and cleaning are redirected to the client.

Business emails are important documents containing critical information. Like any other email, they are likely to be infected with email virus. An ordinary email when infected may be mundane enough to be deleted, but not so the business messages. Many antivirus software delete the infected email when unable to clean it. Such packages if employed at company’s server and workstations may not work to your satisfaction. Also any laxity in updating the antivirus may leave a loophole for some virus to sneak in.

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