Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0

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• Limit legal liability
• Increase Productivity
• Preserve Valuable Network Resource

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• Protect users from virus threat
• Prevent Loss of Data
• Reduce Costly Down Time

eDoxs has partnered with Symantec / Brightmail to offer their services to small and medium size enterprises. eDoxs offers the entire Brightmail Solutions Suite as an "e-sourced" service running on a network of fully redundant Sun Microsystems Solaris Powered Servers strategically deployed throughout the country. We have designed our pricing to meet the needs of our highly competitive markets and believe that we can offer a cost effective solution for these "Best in Class" services.

eDoxs acts as a gateway to defend against spam and virus attacks before reaching the enterprise IT messaging infrastructure. This eliminates the need to spend valuable IT resources fighting a constantly changing battle. Unlike spam filtering techniques that use content filtering, Brightmail offers the only spam identification service that uses "real human beings" to determine what is spam, and what is not. Brightmail monitors a large collection of email accounts with a statistical reach of over 100 million email addresses. The email accounts in this pool consist of those owned by Brightmail and those owned by Brightmail’s Probe Partners, who include some of the largest ISPs and commercial enterprises in the world. These mailboxes are not real functioning mailboxes used by individuals, but are spam harvesting decoys analogous to “bear traps” or “honey pots”.

When a Brightmail probe detects a possible spam attack on the Internet, the probe immediately routes the message to the “Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center” (BLOC), a spam-analysis center staffed round-the-clock, 365 days a year. The BLOC consists of a dedicated team of email experts whose mission is to provide swift, accurate responses to spam threats, and pro-actively research and develop technologies that eliminate future threats. When spam has been properly identified, a rule is written against it and a pattern file to identify it is defined. This pattern file is very similar to a virus pattern file, and can identify matching files very quickly. eDoxs servers are updated by Brightmail approximately every three to five minutes with new pattern files. All email passing through the eDoxs servers are electronically compared to these pattern files so customer email is never physically read. The average time delay to pass through the process is about 400ms.

eDoxs uses Symantec's Norton anti-virus to further enhance its offering. We are aware that most of our customers already have some form of anti-virus protection, but feel so strongly in what the combination Brightmail/Symantec service offers, we don't even offer one without the other. Symantec is a formidable investor in Brightmail, and they really believe in the method of Brightmail's service delivery. Symantec offers early warning advice on new viruses to the BLOC sometimes hours before a solution can be implemented. This allows Brightmail to sideline or block the virus before an inoculation has been provided by Symantec. This virus protection offered as a service by eDoxs should in no way replace any anti-virus already in place, as it will not provide protection from infected email from services such as Hotmail, that are Internet based, or viruses brought in on infected floppies, etc. We do provide very valuable first line virus protection on email borne viruses entering the enterprise though port 25, (SMTP mail) where 87% of viruses today originate.

How Does it Work?

The eDoxs service is an outsourced service which has basically two methods of implementation. The method used, is determined by the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) utilized at the customer site. If the enterprise email is handled by Sendmail, or Sendmail for NT version 8.11 and up, the email can be routed directly to our Brightmail servers over a secure-shell (SSH) connection using the Sendmail "Milter" option. For most other MTA's like Microsoft Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, Lotus Notes, or Novell Groupwise, filtering is accomplished by establishing a new higher priority Mail Exchanger (MX) record, which points to our servers. The eDoxs servers process the mail, and relay it directly to your mail server at the address which used to be the primary MX (now the secondary MX).

Using the updated anti-spam/anti-virus rules transmitted from the BLOC, the eDoxs server checks each message and identifies any mail which matches any of the predefined electronic patterns. If a spam pattern is matched, the subject line is marked up with "[Suspected Spam]" in front of the original subject wording. Viruses are marked up and the virus portion deleted if they are unable to be cleaned, or marked up and cleaned if an inoculation was found. All email is routed to the customer's mail server, and nothing is stored on our servers, unless of course, the customer's mail server cannot accept mail. Mail will be held and re-tried for up to five days before it is rejected as undeliverable to the sender.