– Angelos Kottas, Principal Manager, Symantec Corporation (www.symantec.com), says:
There are two primary approaches to blocking spam. The first, and more traditional, approach is to scan the content of emails to look for specific content or patterns that are associated with spam messages. This can include analysis of embedded URLs, use of key words and images, and other forms of content analysis. In addition, most antispam solutions have added some level of reputation analysis at the connection time. This method of spam fighting looks at the source of the email (the sender IP), and determines if that source is known to be a spam sender. More adaptive approaches can also monitor the history of a sender’s email flow over time and start throttling back connections when the percentage of emails that are spam starts to increase.
Putting antivirus and antispam at the gateway and on mail servers provide tremendous advantages for the data center. These products can stop unwanted email and malware before they enter the data center. With spam this will reduced the amount of storage used on unwanted mail. From a protection standpoint, this acts as a choke point, preventing malware from spreading throughout the organization and make containment and clean up easier.
Additionally antispam and antivirus are more effective when kept updated. Fast and complete distribution of new content to desktops solutions is complex and slow. Many organizations limit updates to once a day. Because the number of mail servers in a company are a fraction of the number of desktops and consistently well managed, mail server solutions can be updated continuously, keeping protection always current against the latest threats.
A key feature of these type of solutions is of course their effectiveness at stopping spam and malware. Readers should also consider the solution’s integrations with the mail server, other security solution, ease of management of the solution, and additional features they offer.
Most people would not consider their house secure if only one door was locked. Mail server and Gateway security are critical to ensure that all doors of a corporation are locked.
