A Game of Thrones analogy describes the purpose of our award-winning Email Security service, Pepea Antispam/antivirus filtering. In case you missed the past 7 years of the HBO series, the Wall is a 482 kilometers long, 700 feet tall and about 300 feet wide bolstering of ice. It separated the world of the living from whatever evil the people believed lay beyond the gargantuan mass of ice. An army of men known as the Night’s Watch take vows and are commissioned to man the famous fortification for a lifetime hence the name, the Watchers on the Wall. With this in mind, think of Message Labs Africa as the Wall upended between you and the evils that lie within the internet and Pepea antispam/antivirus filtering as the Watchers on the Wall.
A closer look
In this article, we take a closer look into how Pepea antispam/antivirus filters spam emails embedded with viruses, worms and other types of malware before delivering the clean emails to your recipients’ mailbox. Inbound emails, just as in the name are emails that are incoming into your company’s mailbox from external sources while outbound emails are those being sent outside the company.
Today, it is estimated that about 60-70% of computer and system virus infections can be attributed to malware downloaded via email. This is why our filtering system is designed to offer 99.9% professional protection by screening each email to ensure that 99.9% of junk emails are quarantined in an antispam portal where clients can choose to restore the quarantined emails.
Manning the Wall
It begins with configuring your DNS records to point to our gateway servers. The process of filtration is then initiated by gateway servers installed between your mail system or any other infrastructure and the internet such that all your users’ emails are delivered to our servers first for filtering. Each gateway server is capable of handling large volumes of email traffic and the service can be activated in minutes.
For clients with their own mail servers, the process begins with changing MX records to ensure all emails hit our gateway servers first and allowing our range of IP addresses on your server for email delivery. Clients who do not own their own servers provide a fully comprehensive list of all email accounts including any forwarding and group accounts. Clean emails are then sent to our mail store servers where your mailboxes will reside To ensure that no email is lost nor services disrupted during the DNS propagation period, email redirection from your current host is done prior to the MX records change.
- Envelope filtering
This process conducts a number of checks on each email source, attachments, among others. Emails that pass these checks go-ahead to content filtering while those that fail are bounced.
- Content filtering
At this stage, the server analyzes each email to check if the email contains any spam content. If the email contains any spam content, it is quarantined and the clean email relayed to client’s server or our mail store servers
- Quarantine and email routing
Emails deemed as spam or junk are automatically sent to our antispam portal and kept there. From here, you may look at quarantined emails in case you need to restore.
- Cloud
Clean or genuine emails are then routed to the cloud and finally to the client’s server.
- Client’s server
For those with their own mail servers, clean emails are routed to your server while those who lack the servers have their cleaned emails sent to our mail store servers where the users’ mailboxes reside.
Just like the Night’s Watch, we have taken a vow to offer 99.9% professional protection from the evils lurking in the cloud that attempt to sneak past you through unsolicited junk emails. We are available to you 24/7 with our support services with real people in the event you need to talk to us.
