Livehelper.com

Trend Micro InterScan 5 is an anti-virus and content-security solution for an organization’s e-mail gateway. The software sits on your SMTP server and blocks all viruses and malicious or objectionable content at the gateway itself. It also analyses e-mail and attachments for other content that you wish to block on the network, such as spam, large or unwanted attachments and objectionable content. 

It works on Win 2000 Server/NT with Service Pack 6A. It also needs IIS 4 (Internet Information Server) or above on the server. It’s easy to install and a wizard guides you through the installation process. If you get stuck, you can use the detailed user manual that accompanies the software. Once up and running you can configure all its settings using a Web browser, meaning you can manage the setup from any remote machine. It needs IE 5 installed on the client for managing it. It doesn’t support Netscape Navigator. 

All settings on the Web interface are grouped under two heads: Configuration and Policy Manager. This makes it very easy to set up and navigate. Configuration covers all system settings such as security, system monitor, logs and registration. Policy Manager contains policies or filters that a company can enforce on e-mail usage. It’s a set of rules containing filters to protect against viruses, unwanted message attachments, large messages, inappropriate content and spam. The software has a set of default policies or filters that can be used or edited, or you can create new ones from scratch. Moreover, different policies or rules can be applied to different groups within your organization. For example, you can create e-mail address groups of employees who share common filters or belong to the same division. 

The software maintains extensive logs for all events, which make it easy to get an overview of what’s happening. Upon virus detection you can configure it to clean, delete or quarantine the infected e-mail. You can define different actions for different groups. For instance, you may want to delete all infected mail for a particular group and quarantine them for another. 

It’s also possible to see the system status, such as the number of messages in the processing queue, number of messages processed and number of viruses detected. For all events, notifications can be sent to the system administrator via e-mail. The software also features automatic virus update downloads. 

We tested the viruses scanning and content-filtering capabilities of the software on a Win 2000 machine. The software was able to detect viruses successfully. It was also able to block mail containing unsuitable content and send back notification messages to the administrator regarding the action taken by the software. Moreover, it can also send notifications to the sender and receiver of such e-mail. 

The Bottom Line A useful software to control viruses and objectionable content from entering or going out of your e-mail gateway. 

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs