ANTI VIRUS, ANTI SPAM, CONTENT MANAGEMENT: Trend Micro InterScan 5.5 MSS  

InterScan Messaging Security Suite (MSS) is an anti virus and content-management solution for the Internet mail gateway. Its various features are: anti-virus protection for both incoming and outgoing mail (including Microsoft Office macro virus scanning), content management (to analyze e-mail messages and attachments for content traveling to and from the network), denial of service protection for the mail server, protection against malicious e-mail content (such as HTML script files, Java applets and ActiveX controls) and limiting of mass mailing of virus content.

InterScan MSS sits between your various SMTP mail servers and the Internet. It acts as a single security solution for all the e-mail servers of your organization, minimizing the installation and configuration of different solutions on different servers. It scans all mail coming in to or going out of the mail servers and disallows mail with viruses and inappropriate content (as set in the policy) to pass through. It even stops open e-mail relay, allowing only the designated SMTP servers to relay e-mail to the Internet. If you have an e-mail gateway, then you can either replace it by MSS or install MSS before the gateway. You can install it on both your local and remote systems.

Anti spam, anti virus and content control in a single box

The virus scanner can scan through 20 layers of compressed files. To protect against attacks, which involve sending highly compressed zip files to load the server, you can set the maximum size of a file after decompression. MSS uses virus and content policies to allow or disallow mail to flow through it. The policies are applied to a group of users and can be created with different settings. The policies use filters to match e-mail messages. You can create these filters for viruses and content. In content, you can create filters for message attachments, message content, message size and anti spam. You can also create your own filters to screen messages on almost any criteria. For instance, you can permit only JPEG images and not heavy BITMAP images or stop messages from sending certain important text out of your mailing system. 

The message attachment filter can limit the sizes of the messages and attachments and the number of attachments that you can send or receive. You can enforce the message size filter on a weekly calendar to block or allow messages at a particular time of the day. You can also create complex filters using expressions containing keywords and operators. But you have to read the manual for doing all this. 

The minimum system requirements for MSS are 800 MHz P III or equivalent processor, 256 MB RAM, Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server or NT with SP 6A, IIS 4.0 or above. Though its installation is simple, you need to be familiar with your messaging system setup before you start.

The bottom line: A comprehensive protection tool against e-mail threats and a great content-management solution for your messaging system.

Anoop Mangla