Stopping Spam and Virus at the Gateway

[robphillips79]

I've been looking at a few products such as MailFrontier, eTrust, and NetCleanse which are used to stop spam and viruses at the gateway before penetrating the network. One problem that seems to occur is the way in which it is set up.

I don't have a mail server on the network where the clients retrieve from (like Exchange). Instead, they individually have their email pulled in from the ISP's POP3 server.

Does anybody know of a good solution out there that can still stop spam and viruses at the gateway with that setup? Thanks.

 

[Need4Speed]

unless you have a mailserver on the network, you wont be able to kill spam/virii at the gateway. the gateway only routes tcp/packets, period. one solution would be to set up a local mail server using linux. that server would querry the ISP mailserver using fetchmail and retrieve all the mail for all the users. at that point you could use something like mailscanner/spamassassin to clean out infected mails.

 

[Night201]

Originally posted by: Need4Speed
unless you have a mailserver on the network, you wont be able to kill spam/virii at the gateway. the gateway only routes tcp/packets, period. one solution would be to set up a local mail server using linux. that server would querry the ISP mailserver using fetchmail and retrieve all the mail for all the users. at that point you could use something like mailscanner/spamassassin to clean out infected mails.

This is what I use.

Do you have an extra computer laying around? You can download a program called ClarkConnect from clarkconnect.com and use that as the mail server. You can then download and install Mailscanner and it it along with Spamassassin to filter everything. I use it along with ClamAV which is a free email virus scanner. It checks for updates every hour and many times downloads updates before McAfee and Symantec have definitions. I've never had a problem with it. It's great.

Contact me if you have any questions.