Email is a key tool for all businesses, but experts estimate that between 80 and 85% of email traffic in the UK is unsolicited junk mail, some of which contains dangerous computer viruses. One recent report* by anti-spam organisation, SoftScan, found that spam accounted for 88.51% of emails sent to UK homes and businesses.
THUS, through its Demon brand, is now offering MailDefender, its state-of-the-art anti-spam service, to Demon Business Broadband customers. It offers the same protection via broadband that businesses with Demon National Ethernet, High Speed Internet and Internet Leased Line accounts already enjoy. The service is now available to organisations with as few as 15 email users, however, it is scalable enough for use in corporations with tens of thousands of staff situated in different countries.
Inner workings
MailDefender works by filtering out spam, viruses and fraudulent requests for confidential data (a process known as 'phishing') before they get to your network. This offers the additional benefit of reducing overheads on both your bandwidth and mail server.
As MailDefender does not require the installation of a program on a desktop PC or server, it does not negatively impact system performance, a drawback with many other anti-virus/anti-spam applications. This also means it is operating system agnostic; Windows, Mac, or Linux, it makes no difference.
Demon MailDefender is operated remotely by THUS, which routes customers' incoming mail through its own servers, filtering out spam and all known viruses (as identified through continual research by anti-virus expert, Sophos). MailDefender also employs heuristics technology to scan for viruses that have not yet been identified. Emails are also compared to a database, operated by Cloudmark, which stores lists of known site addresses that send phishing emails.
"Another security benefit of MailDefender is that it hides your mail server's IP address from outsiders who research the DNS belonging to your domain, preventing your organisation being singled out for something like a denial of service attack using that technique" says MailDefender Product Manager, Robert Ralphs.
Once scanned, 99% of emails are relayed to customers' inboxes within five minutes. MailDefender enables each individual user in an organisation to view their spam, held in quarantine on a Demon server for up to 21 days, so that they can retrieve messages that may have been erroneously filtered out, perhaps because a genuine correspondent used unfortunate wording. Individuals can even modify their own personal filter settings, blocking, for example, all emails written in a particular language, or set up an Allow List for people from whom emails should never be blocked.
IT managers can access a portal to quickly and easily administer their MailDefender account, allowing them to add and delete users, import and export user lists, reset passwords, create reports and so on.
Location independent
MailDefender filters email addressed to employees at up to six different mail domains as standard, so that email addresses can be assigned to reflect the location of staff in different countries, for example. There is an option for large companies to add even more domains if required. "There is also a free-of-charge option to have MailDefender scan all outgoing emails which prevents your organisation's good name ever being tarnished by inadvertently passing on a virus," says Ralphs.
MailDefender effectively provides a back up of vital correspondence should your email server crash. While a mail server is down or offline due to a network outage, MailDefender scans and queues up outstanding messages and keeps trying to send them. Messages older than five days expire and their sender is informed that their email could not be delivered.
"Another great thing about MailDefender is that because it's managed by THUS, it's invisible on a day-to-day basis, yet it is also a flexible and professionally run service. The customer doesn't have to worry about keeping it up to date," says Ralphs.
The service, which takes a maximum of two days for THUS to set up, is available for a minimum of one year, renewable on a monthly basis thereafter. "This is the first cost-effective service, which affords mission critical protection to small and medium-sized businesses' email services," he says.
For further information on how MailDefender can protect you business, please visit http://www.demon.net/maildefender.
*Spam figures released by SoftScan, May 2007.