Spam and viruses are a considerable problem for organisations that receive thousands of harmful and unwanted emails everyday. Today, spam accounts for 85-90% of all emails and viruses approximately 1%.

With external email scanning from SoftScan you can forget all about spam and viruses, and concentrate on tasks that will add value to your business.

Protect your email traffic – without investing in hardware and software

SoftScan protects your email communications with market leading spam and virus scanners combined with SoftScan’s own intelligent scanner, Paranoid.

SoftScan is a hosted service, which means that your organisation is completely free from managing installations or software updates – the solution is constantly updated and optimised by knowledge gained from the millions from emails that are scanned everyday by SoftScan.

Everything is done for you – you simply route your email traffic through SoftScan. All emails pass through SoftScan’s security service. Infected and unwanted emails are sent to the quarantine zone and only clean email is delivered to your own mail server (with an imperceptible delay). I

n addition, you can choose to send all outgoing emails via SoftScan, which will ensure that no viruses are sent from your organisation.

How the SoftScan email security service works

The components of SoftScan email security service

The strength behind SoftScan’s service lies in its ability to combine a number of components together to provide maximum security.All anti-spam scanning can be configured to your own tolerance levels and is achieved through a combination of scanning content, signature matches, Bayesian filtering and black/white lists. All scanners update automatically every 15 minutes.

Reputation Filter

The first defence in SoftScan’s service is the Reputation Filter, which automatically blocks emails from servers that are known to deliver spam. In this way, large quantities of spam can be removed, reducing the load on the scanning system and minimising the effects of new techniques introduced by spammers.

When an email is accepted by SoftScan’s servers, the Reputation Filter performs an assessment of the sender. It looks-up the IP address in a number of internal and external databases that collect data about the senders of spam and viruses.

SoftScan constantly monitors and rates the quality of the external databases to ensure that it only blocks emails from “black-listed” senders.

When an email is rejected by the Reputation Filter the sender will immediately receive a status email explaining the reason for the rejection.

Three leading virus scanners

The solution uses three leading virus scanners ClamAV, Kaspersky and Trend Micro.The three conventional anti-virus scanners work together with SoftScan’s own heuristic scanner Paranoid to protect against unwanted emails.

Paranoid

Paranoid constantly analyses patterns in the emails it accepts to ensure that it stops as yet unknown viruses before traditional antivirus scanners have updated their filters.

Paranoid learns and updates with every email it scans. The result is a scanner that is extremely effective with almost no false positives.

Paranoid provides an additional layer of configurable scanning features that are able to detect suspicious content or block emails which violate an organisation’s security policy. A particular function of Paranoid is Virus Probability Analysis (VPA). T

he VPA scans and analyses all emails as they pass through the system, identifying and categorising viruses, that are not yet known by conventional anti-virus scanners.

User Configuration

Do you want the sales department to be protected against spam? Or would they prefer prompt notification of any email stopped? Should marketing be the only department that can receive large files? Do you require for a copy of every email to be backed-up?

SoftScan’s web based administrators console allows you to navigate and set-up the solution to reflect your own email policy, personal preferences or local legislation. Eg. You can set up the system to filter mails from specific senders and domains.

If you require additional security, the system can be configured to remove all content that may be harmful within your emails, and only allow the content text. This feature is a benefit to users of mobile phones and PDAs, which have low bandwidth capabilities.