If you still don't have an anti-spam or anti-virus running on your e-mail
server, here is a comprehensive solution for that. Emergic CleanMail (ECM) is an
OS, based on Linux platform and has in-built anti-spam and anti-virus protection
for e-mail servers. Apart from these basic features, it has in-bound content and
attachment filtering. It gives you the freedom to define your own white and
black lists of e-mail addresses and domains. You can also set the algorithm to
be used for scanning. For anti-virus scanning, it uses clamAV and F-Prot by
default, but if you want, you can also have support for other scannings, such as
Sophos, MacAfee, F-Secure, etc. This also facilitates you with a feature called
Dictionary Check, which helps you explicitly define the rule-set for detecting
spam. For example, you can specify that all mails with a particular word in the
subject or body, should be treated as spam. The minimum requirement for the
Emergic CleanMail to function, is Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD, a network card
and of course Internet connectivity. The ECM has to be placed between the
Internet and your mail server. After scanning the mails, it relays them to your
mail server and maintains logs in a database. The logs register the sender and
recipient for each mail, as well as size and status of each mail. Best thing
about ECM is that, if supposedly, your mail server goes down, then ECM will
queue your e-mails and deliver them, when your mail server comes up again. So,
it also works as a buffer for you mail server.
For testing it, we ran it on the minimum required hardware, as mentioned
above. The time taken to install ECM was only 15 minutes. The installation was
also easy. After that we placed the box on the Internet and opened its browser
interface remotely. Configuring ECM was easy. We set it to relay all e-mails to
our local e-mail server. For the test, we fired several e-mails from one of the
test accounts that we had created. It successfully relayed all incoming e-mails
to our mail server and blocked all spams successfully. We also tested it for
anti-virus and it performed well. We checked for 'Dictionary checks' option, and
for this we fired many e-mails which we defined as spam, in the rule set of the
ECM. For testing the 'Mail queue' option, we temporarily unplugged the server
from the network and tested the ECM. It successfully queued up the mail, until
the mail server was up again.
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Bottom Line: Overall, ECM performed well and it is worth buying.