Modus 4.7 Secure Email Management—Protect Your Email from Spam, Information Theft & More
Keeping up with spam is a never-ending battle (and frequently a losing one, too). These days, spam can do much worse than annoy you with ads:
- It can cause a "spam loop" that drains server resources, cutting you off from essential services.
- It can "take over" legitimate email accounts (and entire computers!) in order to produce more spam.
- It can sneak in a phishing attack, threatening your corporate data & each employee's information as well.
- It can lead to a denial of service (DoS) attack, crashing whole networks and choking off their bandwidth.
Whether you use hosted email or run an Exchange server locally, the threat is there. Technology exists to filter obvious spam, but the less obvious emails pose real danger. How do you secure your email, and still make sure the right messages get through?
This is why PlanetMagpie recommends (and uses) Vircom's
Modus 4.7 Secure Email Management. One of the most comprehensive email filtering/protection systems, Modus saves end users, system administrators and organizations valuable time & resources. It's also one of the most popular – ModusGate is the email protector of choice for over 6 million Microsoft Exchange users worldwide!
(Vircom modusGate certified by Virus Bulletin Magazine in its June 2010 anti-spam tests) How Modus Works
Modus passes arriving emails through a three-step process. This process is invisible to everyday users; you only see the emails you want to receive by the end of it. Here's how the process works.
- Prevent Threats from Entering the Network
Taking a proactive approach towards securing email, Modus deploys a perimeter defense at the network edge. Harmful emails that would otherwise penetrate the network are trashed. Plus, Modus fortifies emails servers by reducing the number of messages that require network-level treatment. This saves a lot of bandwidth, CPU and IT resources. - Email Filtering
Once accepted into the network pipeline, emails undergo an exhaustive series of checks for policy adherence, spam, viruses and other malware. This is where your email policies are brought into play. Modus enforces communication policies you set yourself, guarding against loss of proprietary information, analyzing outgoing emails in case phishing tries to steal data, etc. Modus' SCA anti-spam engine is activated here too. Combining predictive and deterministic technologies, the SCA's unique approach of detecting spam patterns within messages (instead of a broad sweep) means it catches over 98% of spam, with a 0.001% false-positive rate. - Delivery
Once an email is certified as clean, it's sent to your inbox. And because message delivery is technology-independent, Modus works with any email system. Use it as a server, a gateway, or as a hosted email service. Modus technology is easy to manage, and very versatile. Modus 4.7 adds a new feature here: auto-whitelisting. A white list contains those email addresses you've identified as acceptable. Based on that list or a previous email exchange, Modus adds new email address to its white list when new messages come in.
Advantages of Modus to Business Users
Modus brings many more advantages than a simple spam filter. These are a few of them:
- Scans incoming and outgoing emails for any dangerous material. For example, phishing attacks, identity theft traps, malware, viruses, proprietary company information, etc.
- Daily Quarantine Reports sent to your email account to show you what Modus has caught and prevented from coming in (in case an email you expected got caught in the spam filter).
- Modus 4.7 contains new updates for the Quarantine Report – including the ability to block individual senders.
- Blacklists to block unfriendly contacts, and Whitelists to admit trusted contacts without delay.
- Encrypt individual emails through Vircom's built-in partnership with PGP. Systems administrators have many reasons to use Modus for secure email too. In addition to all the protections listed above, they have:
- ISP-inspired multi-level service delegation
- A multi-layered checking system, with Bounce Address Tag Validation (BATV)
- Windows Server 2008 support (32-bit only)
- A monitor for outgoing email as well
- Foreign language support
- Spam Loop prevention in place
- The ability to set & enforce email policies (incoming and outgoing)
How do you get Modus? Two ways:
- Buy Modus 4.7 and have PlanetMagpie install it on your Exchange-based email server
- Move to PlanetMagpie Hosted Email. Modus 4.7 protects all our client email accounts by default.
With Modus you only receive the emails you want to. Call PlanetMagpie Network Support at
408.541.5100 and ask about Modus Secure Email.
