Introduction
MailScanner is already a highly-respected open source e-mail security system, with more users than AOL and Hotmail combined, and this new release increases its stability and performance.
It processes 500 million e-mail messages every day, removing 2 million viruses and identifying 75 million spam messages. MailScanner is used at 20,000 sites around the world protecting top government departments, commercial corporations and educational institutions. It is becoming a standard feature of many ISP's as virus protection and spam filtering are now essential requirements for most users.
MailScanner scans all e-mail for viruses, spam and attacks against security
vulnerabilities. It is not tied to any particular virus scanner, but can be used
with any combination of 14 different virus scanners, allowing sites to choose
the "best of breed" virus scanner. Being open source, site administrators can
audit and verify the integrity of the system. Its role is a major part in the
security of a network, and so it must act as a trusted service. The only way to
achieve the required level of trust is to be open source, an approach the
commercial suppliers are not willing to take. MailScanner has been developed in
a world-leading Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of
Southampton, and is distributed for *FREE* under the GNU Public Licence.
- Scans e-mail for viruses using any combination of up to 14 different virus
scanners
- Automatically updates all installed virus scanners every hour, by default
- Identifies over 95% of spam using several techniques, including highly
advanced heuristics
- Spam can be tagged, rejected, discarded, archived or forwarded to other
addresses for inspection by administrators
- Pornographic spam can be stripped of all graphical content, protecting users
from obscene content
- Scans e-mail for attacks against known and unknown security vulnerabilities
in popular e-mail applications, automatically correcting messages "on the fly"
whenever possible and quarantining dangerous sections of other messages
- Highly scalable: 1 PC can process over 1.5 million e-mail messages per day
- Robust: Protects itself against "Denial of Service" attacks and operating
system resource leaks
- Highly configurable, providing ISP's and ASP's with the possibility of using
thousands of different rules and configurations for any combination of users or
domains
- Easy to set up as all configuration options are supplied with "sensible"
defaults
To find out more, visit the web site at www.mailscanner.info or contact the team
directly at MailScanner@MailScanner.info.
