Setting up your own Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Gateway
with MxScan and MailEnable Standard Edition (Freeware).
There are a lot of Applications and Software packages out there that are designed
to work as a Perimeter/Edge filter for Spam and Viruses. However, most the software
variants are extremely costly and are designed to work on Linux platforms. The antispam
hardware appliances on the other hand are costly and require yearly maintainance.
Furthermore, if you are looking for a software solution that runs on Windows servers,
the choices are limited. While there are open source alternatives, these are normally
not optimized to work on Windows and takes up a lot of effort to setup and manage.
At MxUptime we specialize at delivering Plug and Play Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus solutions
that are very affordable, easy to manage & setup,
has high
spam detection accuracy and a very low false spam
positive count.
When faced with the problem of setting up an email security solution for spam and
viruses, what we did was to couple MailEnable Standard Edition which is available
as Freeware together with MxScan Professional to deliver an unbeatable and cost
effective solution for our clients.
Getting this going was relatively simple, all we needed was the following :
1. A Windows box (can also be a VPS running Virtuozzo, Vmware or Virtual Server)
2.
MailEnable Standard Edition
(if you like the the Standard Edition you should support their
paid versions).
3.
MxScan Professional (for MailEnable)
Once the Windows box was up and running, we proceeded with the installation of MailEnable
followed by MxScan Professional. The trick here was to setup the domains in MailEnable
to act as a SmartHost (right click on the Domain Properties --> check Act as
SmartHost --> then Add the mail server or IP address to forward all the messages
to. That was all that it took.
Having done that, we then setup the MX records for the domains to point to the new
Gateway server instead of the original mail server. And then we setup the smart
host domains in MailEnable to redirect
the message to original email server.
By going with the above solution, we have virtually eliminated all spam messages,
improved the overall
performance of our network, increased security by first pre-processing
the messages through the gateway and most importantly increased the overall end-user
satifisfaction.
Total cost for the setup = US$249.95 (we used a VPS running
Virtual Server)
Zero Spam & Viruses = Priceless $$$