So How does it work compared to my On-Premises Server?

When you have a server on premises you are receiving the emails directly to the server which force you to have a type of filtering on the server for Spam and Viruses before they reach the user Mailboxes. If you are a business with a Small Business Server you know how slow in performance that server can become because all the services and process the server need to perform. One of those is the Email Server part.

When you install an AntiSpam / Antivirus program on your Email Server it add another duty for the server to perform. Not only has to deliver the emails to their respective mailboxes users but now it has to perform certain scans in order to deliver a clean or secure email. Depending on the Spam Filter or Email Antivirus filter you installed when the email gets delivered the user they need to go trough the emails to be sure that none of the good emails are marked as spam and the ones that are spam to block them. This process takes time away from the user because now the user has to go trough all his/her emails and manually filter them. This is not a big process if you do this every day but when the user goes on vacation and return, there can be hundreds of emails the user have to go trough and that can take hours.

Additionally if your on-premises server goes down for any reason, virus, crash or power failure ALL your emails will bounce back to the sender. Sometimes this doesn’t look good because the first question that comes to the sender’s mind is “Are they still in business”. Not only that, if the server goes down in the middle of a very important week or month and you are expecting an email to complete that important sales you won’t get it until the server comes back up.

This is where our Services Come in Place

Nova Hosted Mail Protection has partnered with GFI and were are able to offer a solution for your business. When you use our services the emails are not longer going directly to your server meaning that your server don’t need to have the job of filtering emails, all it has to do is deliver the email to their respective mailbox.

Message handling

GFI MAX MailProtection offers several options for handling of detected junk which can be established globally across one or more domains, or for one or more individual users, and which can be changed at any time. Customers can choose to:

• Drop detected spam – an aggressive approach that reduces a customer’s network bandwidth requirements and mail server load. Due to GFI MAX MailProtection’s extremely low percentage of false positives (legitimate email wrongly classified as spam), it is very rare that a legitimate email message will be dropped.
• Tag and forward detected spam – with a modified subject line, incoming email can be automatically directed to a specific folder in each user’s email program for periodic review and/or deletion.
• Redirect detected spam – junk mail can be directed to an alternative address, e.g., spam@example.com
• Quarantine – junk messages are redirected to individual web-mail quarantine accounts that can be reviewed at any time by end users. The most common choice of larger businesses and ISPs, this approach reduces bandwidth requirements and mail server load for customers while providing complete assurance that no legitimate message will ever be lost.

Message digests

Customers can opt to receive periodic message digests, which provide each user a summary list of the junk email received for them. Digests can be sent as infrequently as once per week, or as frequently as several times per day, at times defined by the customer. Each digest includes a means to immediately release each message from the quarantine in case it is or may be legitimate, providing reassurance that no valid mail is being detected as spam.

Messaging analysis

GFI MAX MailProtection uses a combination of techniques for spam and message analysis. While generally no single element will by itself classify a message as spam, the use of multiple methods in conjunction with each other reduces the number of false positives compared to other approaches to spam detection.

GFI MAX MailProtection continually refines its message analysis techniques, with a focus on adaptive technologies to detect evolving spam patterns. GFI MAX MailProtection incorporates techniques such as:

• Authenticity checks including detailed header analysis, SMTP conversation details, message encoding and formatting, etc.,
• Message fingerprinting to compare email signatures to frequently-updated public and internal databases of known spam messages.
• An extensive, continually updated Heuristic Rule Set that encompasses message headers, body text, and other characteristics of both English and non-English language messages.
• Public and private blacklists of mail servers, relays, or networks known to be used by spammers.
• Extensive URI databases of unique elements such as URLs, phone numbers, and physical addresses known to be used by spammers.
• Incorporation of Domain history and reputation to increase the accuracy of blacklists and URI databases.
• Real-time message source analysis to assess whether an increased volume of mail flow is simply a legitimate high-volume mailing, or the result of a spammer hijacking or the use of a ‘zombie’ network.
• Dynamic feedback-based rules optimization to leverage feedback from thousands of GFI MAX MailProtection service users, as well as from many monitored legitimate and ‘spam trap’ email addresses.
• User-based message profiling that allows for refinement of message scoring for each user based on a history of his or her message traffic.
• Customizable whitelists and blacklists which can be applied on an account-wide, organization-wide, domain-wide, or user-specific basis.

Working together, these elements accurately detect a very high percentage of spam, phishing emails, and other unwanted messages – while minimizing the chances of a legitimate message being detected as spam.

True continuity

GFI MAX MailProtection provides organizations with peace of mind regarding their email via an integrated continuity service.

In the event that the customer’s mail server is temporarily down or inaccessible, GFI MAX MailProtection acts as a message queue. No messages are lost, and people who send email to that organization don’t receive error messages; GFI MAX MailProtection simply stores those messages and delivers them once the customer’s mail server is back online. It uses a timing algorithm to deliver queued messages to ensure that the customer’s mail server is not overwhelmed with a sudden barrage of queued messages once the server is back up and running.

More importantly, customers can access and respond to any queued messages via the GFI MAX MailProtection control panel – allowing customers to continue their business-critical email communications even when their own mail infrastructure is off-line. This on-demand, full-fledged backup mail service is available at any time, without the need for customers to invest in hardware or software or to make any advance preparations other than normal use of the service.

With these features, GFI Software provides companies with true email continuity under circumstances ranging from a brief, planned mail server upgrade, to a major network outage caused by a natural disaster.

Some customers don’t have a backup at all or not even a UPS Battery Backup. Some have a backup strategy in place but are using tapes that are more then 4 years old, others spent the money to get the right software and equipment to backup but they don’t monitor the jobs to be sure the backup is been working. Then the worst scenario happen. Server Crashed by software or hardware failure. Now what? All that money they saved by not paying for a backup software or not paying for a maintenance will be gone in 1 day, some even won’t even be able to recover from the disaster if they never took the time to be sure the backup was working right. So we decided to bring more professional information and share it with you and hope that the customers understand the importance of keeping that box that is in a closet with not AC and collecting dust out of harms way.

This information was obtain from Symantec Website from the Expert Bernard Laroche and here is the direct link

Here is a Summary of his findings.