MailScan

Microworld’s MailScan is an e-mail scanner for your company’s POP3/SMTP servers. It does virus scanning, content filtering, and compression/decompression of e-mail attachments. It sits on your mail server scanning e-mail for viruses and malicious content. It’s based on MWL (MicroWorld’s WinSock Layer) technology. MWL is a new layer introduced by MicroWorld that sits between the default WinSock 2 layer and your applications. That is, all the data passes through the MWL layer instead of WinSock layer, before reaching the applications. 

MailScan is available for a number of mail servers and mail download software, namely MDaemon, VPOP3, WinRoute, Postmaster, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Scan Gateway edition for Unix and Linux environments. In addition, two specific versions of MailScan are available for mail and SMTP servers. We tested MailScan (build 174) with Exchange server. 

A wizard helps you through an easy installation process. You don’t need to install anything extra on the client machines. All you need is to specify the IP address of the e-mail server, on which MailScan is installed, as your SMTP and POP3 server. MailScan is automatically started when you start your machine. It sits on the taskbar and works in the background. You’ll also find an eScan Server update icon in the taskbar, which is used to update virus definitions from the Web. However, for this to work you’d have to enable the Auto download and Update configuration check box from the Scanner administrator and also specify the URL of the site from which you wish to update the virus definition files. By default, it uses MicroWorld’s website. 

The various functions of the software are neatly arranged on its interface under different called Scanner administrator, Content control, Compression control, MailScan messages, and Scan control. You could use Scanner Administrator to define features such as the action you want MailScan to take while detecting a virus, specify the file extensions you want scanned. Content-control tab is used to enter all such words, which you want
MailScan to block in e-mail.

Compression control is used to automatically compress outgoing mails with large e-mail attachments. This is a useful feature and you can effectively use it to save your network bandwidth. Using MailScan it’s also possible to send notification messages to the sender, recipient, and administrator, informing them of the virus or filtered content in an e-mail. You can customize all such messages from the MailScan messages tab. Scan control is used to enter specific user IDs, whose e-mails you wish to scan, plus you can also specify user IDs whose e-mails you don’t want MaiScan to scan.

We tested the software for its different features and it passed all our tests successfully.
To test its virus-detection capability we attached a virus with a vbs extension in our e-mail. The software can immediately detect the virus and sends notification messages to the sender, recipient, and the administrator. The software also logs all activities in a log, which you can view later. To test its content-filtering capability we entered certain restricted words deep inside an e-mail message. MailScan blocked the mail and sent notification messages to the intended recipients. Its
compression/decompression feature also worked well, automatically compressing a huge e-mail attachment and delivering it to the recipient. 

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs