Emergic CleanMail

This solution not only protects your mail server from viruses and spam, but also acts as temporary backup, if your mail server goes down

Thursday, August 09, 2007

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If you still don't have an anti-spam or anti-virus running on your e-mail server, here is a comprehensive solution for that. Emergic CleanMail (ECM) is an OS, based on Linux platform and has in-built anti-spam and anti-virus protection for e-mail servers. Apart from these basic features, it has in-bound content and attachment filtering. It gives you the freedom to define your own white and black lists of e-mail addresses and domains. You can also set the algorithm to be used for scanning. For anti-virus scanning, it uses clamAV and F-Prot by default, but if you want, you can also have support for other scannings, such as Sophos, MacAfee, F-Secure, etc. This also facilitates you with a feature called Dictionary Check, which helps you explicitly define the rule-set for detecting spam. For example, you can specify that all mails with a particular word in the subject or body, should be treated as spam. The minimum requirement for the Emergic CleanMail to function, is Pentium 4, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD, a network card and of course Internet connectivity. The ECM has to be placed between the Internet and your mail server. After scanning the mails, it relays them to your mail server and maintains logs in a database. The logs register the sender and recipient for each mail, as well as size and status of each mail. Best thing about ECM is that, if supposedly, your mail server goes down, then ECM will queue your e-mails and deliver them, when your mail server comes up again. So, it also works as a buffer for you mail server.

For testing it, we ran it on the minimum required hardware, as mentioned above. The time taken to install ECM was only 15 minutes. The installation was also easy. After that we placed the box on the Internet and opened its browser interface remotely. Configuring ECM was easy. We set it to relay all e-mails to our local e-mail server. For the test, we fired several e-mails from one of the test accounts that we had created. It successfully relayed all incoming e-mails to our mail server and blocked all spams successfully. We also tested it for anti-virus and it performed well. We checked for 'Dictionary checks' option, and for this we fired many e-mails which we defined as spam, in the rule set of the ECM. For testing the 'Mail queue' option, we temporarily unplugged the server from the network and tested the ECM. It successfully queued up the mail, until the mail server was up again.

Bottom Line: Overall, ECM performed well and it is worth buying.

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