Because nearly every organization has a mail system, they are the most common transports used to attack networks.

igxglobal's Secure Mail service receives all mail on behalf of its clients. This allows a company to limit access to its mail system to igxglobal's redundant array of Secure Mail servers. Simply put, an organization’s mail system is no longer exposed to EVERYONE on the Internet.

Statistics show that half of all attempts to access the mail server for any organization are compromise or pipeline attempts, which are used to hack or deliver high-volume SPAM to your mail server.

igxglobal's Secure Mail servers bear the brunt of all direct attacks, including compromise and denial of service attempts. The Secure Mail servers not only catch individual viruses that try to penetrate a system, but they also prevent massive attacks that can easily overrun most other mail systems.

The Secure Mail servers start to work from the moment a remote user attempts to connect. A series of well thought out security policies goes to work to check the validity of the remote sender and verifies that the communications protocols adhere to well defined Internet standards.

Attackers often try to capitalize on other mail systems’ tolerance to non-standard communications to deliver SPAM or worse yet compromise the system.

Secure Mail severs also analyze the content of an e-mail for virus and malicious content. Multiple virus and malicious content scanners review every e-mail to verify that it is safe before it is opened. Virus patterns and definitions are updated around the clock to ensure continuous security.

At the first sign of a virus, the Secure Mail servers quarantine the offending e-mail and immediately notify both the sender and recipient.

The Secure Mail servers utilize a multi-method, intelligent anti-SPAM system to identify and tag unsolicited E-Mail (UE).

First, every e-mail source is checked against a database of known SPAMmers and networks that should not be sending mail. Professional SPAMmers can deliver hundreds of thousand if not millions of SPAM messages with a single connection. Therefore, this technique has been shown to eliminate a significant number of SPAM messages on its own.

Then all individual e-mails are hash-checked against a worldwide database of known SPAM messages. A match is a sure sign that the e-mail is SPAM.

Finally a heuristic analysis of the e-mail components scans the header, source, destination, subject, and body of the message searching for SPAM behavior. Each behavior receives positive or negative points. When a predetermined number of points is reached the e-mail is tagged as SPAM.

Upon the determination that any mail message is unsolicited e-mail, it is tagged in the subject line with a *****SPAM***** indicator. Mail is never deleted or held back so the user has access to all e-mails sent. All tagged messages can then be filtered into a SPAM folder and off the user's desktop.

Most mail is sent in clear text. This means that prying eyes may be able to look at any e-mail or files sent or received. The Secure Mail servers address this by employing Transport Layer Security (TLS) to make sure e-mails are sent and received encrypted. The Secure Mail servers apply some intelligence to this approach as well. When a request to receive e-mail is initiated, the Secure Mail ask the remote system if it has the encryption capabilities of TLS. If the remote system supports encryption then all future communications will be encrypted.

Once received, the Secure Mail servers decrypt the mail prior to scanning to ensure a virus is not hidden in an encrypted message.

igxglobal also assists the organizations with which its customers frequently exchange e-mail in setting up TLS on their own mail server so both entities can benefit from encrypted e-mail protection.

Most organizations focus on protection from mal-intended traffic into their network. However, many overlook the potentially embarrassing situation of unwittingly becoming the source of an e-mail based outbreak or attack. The Secure Mail servers support not only inbound traffic but also protect an organization’s outbound mail. With this service, companies can protect the thousands of recipients in their employees’ address books – and themselves from the hassle and embarrassment of being the source of an outbreak.

The Secure Mail servers will collect and hold all e-mail for up to three days in the event a client’s mail server becomes unavailable. In addition to providing a level of assurance that all electronic correspondence will make its way to the intended recipient, this service eliminates the embarrassment of an instant reply indicating that a message cannot be received.

There is also a cost savings for organizations that need a first or second line of e-mail redundancy.

The Secure Mail servers deliver up-to-the-minute reporting on the e-mails received in a given, week, month or specific date ranges. Clients have access to information, such as:

Total e-mails received

• Discarded e-mails
• Viruses received
• SPAM received

Information is provided through a variety of chart, bar and pie graphs to give a quick and easy view of e-mail usage.

With a variety of Chart, Bar and Pie graphs to give you quick and easy views of your email usage.

The Secure Mail service can be turned up in three easy steps that take less than an hour and require no outage.

1. Purchase Secure Mail service.
2. Change your domain's primary and secondary MX record to point to the Secure Mail Servers.
3. Set a policy on your firewall to allow mail only from the Secure Mail to and from your mail server. It’s as easy as 1-2-3!

Its as easy as 1-2-3!

An analysis of the costs associated with building an Secure Mail type system surfaces two key points:

1. Some of the inherent benefits of the Secure Mail service -- such as the ability to bear the brunt of an attack on behalf of the client, outage protection, high-availability and easy 1-2-3 Turn up -- cannot easily be satisfied internally if at all.
2. Building a Secure Mail type service requires time in selection of the best technologies in virus detection, SPAM control and mail intrusion detection. The capital expenditure includes the purchase of these technologies, implementation and integration time, as well as the sustained costs of maintaining and managing the technology.

The purchase, implementation and management of a similar solution for a 100-person organization costs approximately $20,000.00 for the first year alone. The same service from igxglobal with all the additional added values is delivered for less than one fifth of that cost. The cost of ownership value is clear.