Anti-Spam Solutions: ITS Mail Guard

Is spam taking over your inbox? Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE, or spam) has become a terrible problem. It wastes everyone's time and greatly reduces the efficiency of e-mail, making it difficult to use and easy to miss important messages. One estimate puts the total number of spam messages at 55 billion per day!

All of ITS's web hosting plans already offer automatic detection of e-mail viruses and protection against known spammers. While this blocks 80% or more of spam, it is the final few percent that are progressively more difficult to detect and filter out. For example modern spammers may use only images in a message, making it harder for keyword filters to catch.

ITS Mail Guard - The Complete Solution

ITS Mail Guard combines the convenience of a client-side solution with the "always on," zero footprint approach of a fully managed, server-based system. It even works for businesses running their own mail server in-house, such as Microsoft Exchange. A simple analysis indicates terrific savings from an anti-spam solution:

ITS Mail Guard is available for as little as $1.50 per month per user, and your firm reaps the productivity increase, putting this savings towards your bottom line. Our 30-day free trial period means there is no risk to you! Unlike other filtering solutions, ITS Mail Guard features:

• Highly accurate from day 1
• Zero configuration by employees
• Takes up zero space and processing time on your computers - nothing to install
• Eliminates spam, viruses, and phishing messages
  - junk mail never reaches your inbox
• Automatic daily summary of quarantined messages delivered via e-mail (date, sender, subject, etc. with option to deliver)
• Works for any operating system (Windows, MacOS, Unix, etc.)
• Per user configuration for aggressiveness towards different types of spam
• Personal and companywide blacklists and whitelists of blocked and approved senders
• Quarantined mail saved for 14 days in case users need to recover a message
• Works even if your e-mail and/or web site is not hosted by ITS
• Works very well with Microsoft Exchange (it will greatly reduce the load on your in-house mail server and Internet connection)
• Comparatively empty mailboxes mean e-mail is faster to download or read online
• Can provide a redundant backup to an in-house mail server (if the office Internet connection should ever fail, mail will be spooled by ITS Mail Guard until your server comes back online)
• Uses a complete solution of content filtering, real-time connection pattern (attack) analysis, blacklists, whitelists, and heuristical analysis
• Multiple industrial class virus detection engines are updated every 60 seconds to catch new e-mail viruses faster

Easy To Use

ITS Mail Guard works by scanning incoming mail, with messages classified as spam quarantined by the service. Users can log in to review quarantined e-mail, and there is a daily summary e-mail of all quarantined messages. If necessary, users simply click an entry to override ITS Mail Guard and "release" a message for delivery. This way users checking e-mail on their Blackberry or via WebMail do not have to sort through dozens of spam messages...just a summary or two.

There is nothing to install on any of your PCs...once activated, ITS Mail Guard simply starts working, protecting your e-mail.

How It Works

ITS Mail Guard fits between your current mail server and the Internet, protecting all incoming mail from spam, viruses, phishing messages, and other e-mail threats.

Client-Side Solutions

Client-side software is installed on each user's computer. Client-side solutions like K9 can become very accurate, but still require users to configure their e-mail client, train the program, and check the program periodically to correct any mistakes lest it do a poor job of "learning." ITS can of course help with the initial setup of these programs.

However, even K9 cannot scan what it does not see. Road warriors that frequently use web-based e-mail or other devices such as a Blackberry, Palm, or laptop to check e-mail from the road will not benefit from a program like K9 running on their office PC.

Server-Side Solutions

Server-side software runs on a customer's mail server. Before ITS Mail Guard, we favored client-side spam detection because server-side solutions were difficult to manage. Users would have to remember to log in to a web-based interface to check spam messages (to make sure no "good" mail was accidentally sorted out) and clear out a "spam" or "junk" folder to avoid using up their mailbox disk quota. Thankfully ITS Mail Guard makes managing spam much easier.

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