pmg-intro.adoc

   1 Introduction
   2 ============
   3
   4 What is {pmg}?
   5 --------------
   6
   7 E-mail security begins at the gateway by controlling all incoming and
   8 outgoing e-mail messages. {pmg} addresses the full spectrum of
   9 unwanted e-mail traffic, focusing spam and virus detection. {pmg}
  10 provides a powerful and affordable server solution to eliminate spam,
  11 viruses and blocking undesirable content from your e-mail system. All
  12 products are self-installing and can be used without deep knowledge of
  13 Linux.
  14
  15 image::images/Proxmox-Mailprocessing.png[]
  16
  17 Features
  18 --------
  19
  20 Spam detection
  21 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  22
  23 {pmg} uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam
  24 mail. Here is a short list of used filtering methods:
  25
  26 Receiver Verification::
  27
  28 Many of the junk messages reaching your network are emails to
  29 non-existent useres. Proxmox Mail Gateway detects these emails on SMTP
  30 level, which means before they are transferred to your networks. This
  31 reduces the traffic to be analyzed for spam and viruses up to 90% and
  32 reduces the working load on your mail servers and scanners.
  33
  34 Sender policy framework (SPF)::
  35
  36 Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard for validating
  37 emails and to prevent sender IP address forgery. SPF allows the
  38 administrator of an Internet domain to specify which computers are
  39 authorized to send emails with a given domain by creating a specific
  40 SPF record in the Domain Name System (DNS).
  41
  42 DNS-based Blackhole List::
  43
  44 A DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBL) is a means by which an Internet
  45 site may publish a list of IP addresses, in a format which can be
  46 easily queried by computer programs on the internet. The technology is
  47 built on top of the Domain Name System. DNSBLs are used to publish
  48 lists of addresses linked to spamming.
  49
  50 SMTP Whitelist::
  51
  52 Exclude senders from SMTP blocking. To prevent all SMTP checks
  53 (Greylisting, Receiver Verification, SPF and RBL) and accept all
  54 e-mails for the analysis in the filter rule system, you can add the
  55 following to this list: Domains (Sender/Receiver), Mail address
  56 (Sender/Receiver), Regular Expression (Sender/Receiver), IP address
  57 (Sender), IP network (Sender)
  58
  59 Bayesian Filter - Automatically trained statistical filters::
  60
  61 Some particular words have a higher probability of occurring in spam
  62 emails rather than in legitimate emails. By beeing trained to
  63 recognize those words, the Bayesian checks every email and adjusts the
  64 probabilities of it beeing a spam word or not in its database. This is
  65 done automatically.
  66
  67 Black- and Whitelists::
  68
  69 Black- and Whitelists are an access control mechanism to accept,
  70 block, or quarantine emails to recipients. This allows you to tune the
  71 rule-system by applying different objects like domains, email address,
  72 regular expression, IP Network, LDAP Group, and others.
  73
  74 Autolearning algorithm::
  75
  76 Proxmox Mail Gateway gathers statistical information about spam
  77 emails. This information is used by an autolearning algorithm, so the
  78 system becomes smarter over time.
  79
  80 Spam Uri Realtime BlockList (SURBL)::
  81
  82 SURBLs are used to detect spam based on message body URIs (usually web
  83 sites). This makes them different from most other Real-time
  84 Blocklists, because SURBLs are not used to block spam senders. SURBLs
  85 allow you to block messages that have spam hosts which are mentioned
  86 in message bodies.
  87
  88 Greylisting::
  89
  90 Greylisting an email from a sender your system does not recognize,
  91 means, that it will be temporarily rejected. Since temporary failures
  92 are built into the RFC specifications for mail delivery, a legitimate
  93 server will try to resend the email later on. This is an effective
  94 method because spammers do not queue and reattempt mail delivery as is
  95 normal for a regular Mail Transport Agent.
  96 +
  97 Greylisting can reduce e-mail traffic up to 50%. A greylisted email
  98 never reaches your mail server and thus your mail server will not send
  99 useless "Non Delivery Reports" to spammers.
 100
 101
 102 Virus detection
 103 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 104
 105 {pmg} integrates {clamav}, which is an open-source (GPL) antivirus
 106 engine designed for detecting trojans, viruses, malware and other
 107 malicious threats.
 108
 109 It provides a high performance mutli-threaded scanning daemon, command
 110 line utilities for on demand file scanning, and an intelligent tool
 111 for automatic signature updates.
 112
 113
 114 Object-Oriented Rule System
 115 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 116
 117 The object-oriented rule system enables custom rules for your
 118 domains. It’s an easy but very powerful way to define filter rules by
 119 user, domains, time frame, content type and resulting action. {pmg}
 120 offers a lot of powerful objects to configure your own custom system.
 121
 122 ACTIONS - objects::
 123
 124 Defines the final actions.
 125
 126 WHO - objects::
 127
 128 Who is the sender or receiver of the e-mail?
 129
 130 WHAT - objects::
 131
 132 What is in the e-mail?
 133
 134 WHEN - objects::
 135
 136 When is the e-mail received by Proxmox Mail Gateway?
 137
 138 Every rule has five categories FROM, TO, WHEN, WHAT and ACTION. Every
 139 of these categories can contain several objects and a direction (in,
 140 out or both).
 141
 142 Options range from simple spam and virus filter setups to
 143 sophisticated, highly customized configurations blocking certain types
 144 of e-mails and generating notifications.
 145
 146
 147 Tracking and Logging
 148 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 149
 150 The innovative Proxmox Message Tracking Center tracks and summarizes
 151 all available logs. With the web-based and user friendly management
 152 interface, the IT admins can easily overview and controll all
 153 functions from a single screen.
 154
 155 The Message Tracking Center is very fast and powerful, tested on {pmg}
 156 sites processing over a million emails per day. All different log
 157 files from the last 7 days can be queried and the results are
 158 summarized by an intelligent algorithm.
 159
 160 - Arrival of the email
 161 - Proxmox filtering processing with results
 162 - Internal queue to your email server
 163 - Status of final delivery
 164
 165
 166 Your benefit with {pmg}
 167 -----------------------
 168
 169 * Open source software
 170 * No vendor lock-in
 171 * Linux kernel
 172 * Fast installation and easy-to-use
 173 * Web-based management interface
 174 * REST API
 175 * Huge active community
 176 * Low administration costs and simple deployment
 177
 178
 179 include::getting-help.adoc[]