Safentrix

A free service provider in the cloud that takes care of all spam and viruses that reach your mail server, without even notifying you

Saturday, August 01, 2009

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Spams mails are the most annoyingoccupants of an mailbox. However, there are several technologies that help us do away with them. Safentrix is a cloud-based enterprise class anti-spam solution which blocks spam before it hits your mail server. It saves you from virus and other malware getting into your network. Though there are couple of vendors who offer such kind of solutions, Safentrix is free. But, they add a simple text to all your mails as an advertisment. And that's how they earn money. Also, they have a premium service for corporate clients with added features compliant with industry standards (HIPAA, GLB) has Service Level Agreement, warranty, etc. Under the premium service, your mails won't carry the ad.

We evaluated this solution in a true cloud environment. We first built up a mail server and put it on the public IP. Then we started configuring Safentrix. For this, we first created a new account. We activated the account from the link given in the registered email ID. In the second phase, you need to authenticate that you are the authorized person for the domain to be added to Safentrix. Create a sub-domain which will be specified by Safentrix. After that, you need to change the MX record of your domain with the one specified by Safentrix. Also you need to provide the mail server IP to Safentrix server, for it to forward the mails after scanning them.

The configuration is easy and you don't require a specialized skills for it. It provides you two options; add/remove of Delivery MX and add/remove users. This solution can be integrated with almost all email servers, such as MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, Qmail, Postfix and Sendmail. It is compatible with hosted email service providers as well.

To test our setup, we sent a mail from Gmail to safentrix. The mail was successfully delivered, and the setup was working fine. Then for checking anti-spam, we randomly picked a spam from the spam folder of Gmail account. After whitelisting it, we forwarded the mail to Safentrix. Safentrix successfully blocked the spam and generated a mail which was automatically sent to the sender. This mail carried a key and a link for the sender to simply verify that the mail wasn't a spam.  Once that was done, we sent the same mail again and it was delivered. So, if a human sends a spam he can easily make sure that the email reaches the inbox, which is not good. This can be solved by forwarding that spam to Safentrix server, where it will be analyzed at the backend and blocked globally.

One drawback is that, you can't block a particular mail that you found is a spam for you and want to block only for your domain. For this, you need to configure your client at your local machine. Safentrix also provides the live support for both free and the paid version. We tried this live support ourself and found it satisfactory. It solved almost all of our queries instantly.

Bottomline: A free anti-spam solution that provides additional level of security for your mail server.

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