trimMail Inbox FAQsHave a question that isn't covered below? Click here to ask it.
Question #1:How does trimMail Inbox work? Answer:trimMail Inbox sits between your firewall and your mail servers, so all incoming mail flows through it. When it finds dangerous items, like scripts, hidden in a message, it disables them. When it finds a known virus lurking in an attachment, it deletes the message. It repairs malformed messages. And, of course, each message is run through hundreds of spam tests using such advanced techniques as bayesian heuristics analysis, remote blacklist/checksum/digital signature checking and many more. A score added to the message's hidden header identifies it as spam. By adding a simple rule to your users' email clients, all spam messages are put in a spam folder, where the user can visually scan them before deletion. *** Question #2:Pornography is becoming a legal worry. How does trimMail Inbox handle it? Answer:Like all other junk mail, it is tagged as spam for disposal in the user's email client. *** Question #3:You say trimMail Inbox is easy to setup. But I just worked with a $30,000 spam filter that claimed it was easy to set up. Four weeks later, I'm still trying to get it to work right. How easy is "easy"? Answer:If you know how to add a workstation to your network, punch a hole in your firewall, change a couple of DNS settings, and add rules to your company's email clients, like Microsoft Outlook, Pegasus and Netscape Communicator, you can set up your trimMail Inbox easily. *** Question #4:In my experience "easy setup" means "limited flexibility". What's trimMail Inbox's story? Answer:Because trimMail Inbox uses an evolutionary algorithm, it learns from your mail stream. Gets smarter as it goes. So most people find its default settings to be perfect. But you can easily modify its operations as much as you like. *** Question #5:Is it possible for me to get all my email without spam checking? Answer:Sure. Just list yourself in trimMail Inbox's Bypass List. *** Question #6:How can I avoid having to check for false positives? Answer:Set your trimMail Inbox or your email client to kill all junk mail. But remember, while trimMail Inbox can save you tons of time by pre-tagging bad mail as junk, it's still a computer. Now and then, a message you want may score high enough to be tagged as spam. If you never get a chance to see it, you'll never read it. Example: A few of our Asian clients send us legitimate emails that are relayed through blacklisted servers. That alone wouldn't score high enough to make them spam, but sometimes the wording used tips the scale. *** Question #7:We're running 2,324 users with 8,791 mailboxes on three email servers in Chicago, Fort Worth and London. How do I license this mess? Answer:Just buy the box. Your trimMail Inbox requires no additional user, company, server or domain licenses. trimMail Inbox wants to clean out your email, not your wallet. *** Question #8:OK. How much mail can one trimMail Inbox handle? Answer:We have clocked as much as one hundred thousand messages per hour. But it is 100% dependent on the quality of your mailstream. As they say, "Your results may vary." *** Question #9:How expandable is trimMail Inbox? Answer:If you need more muscle, simply plug in another trimMail Inbox. Same installation instructions as before. *** Question #10:Why shouldn't I just install some spam software on my mail server? Answer:How about blue screens, lost mail, and tech support nightmares? Good spam, antivirus and content filtering requires plenty of resources. Modern email servers also gobble lots of resources. Mixing spam filters with email servers on the same box is not a super idea. In addition, one trimMail Inbox and can feed multiple mail servers. So you can save tons of cash while reducing your system management workload. Here's the clincher: If your mail server(s) go down, your trimMail Inbox will keep collecting the mail till you are back on-line. Try that with the spam+email software solution. *** Question #11:How do you protect me from e-mail that could take over my users' computers and attack my network from inside? Answer:trimMail Inbox disables potentially dangerous web bugs hidden in e-mail messages. It also inactivates all kinds of scripts, including Unix shell scripts, Javascript, Visual Basic scripts and potentially dangerous HTML content, like HTML forms. *** Question #12:What does trimMail Inbox do to protect me from nasties embedded in attachments? Answer:Deletes messages carrying attachments with known viruses. Drops, renames or ignores other specified attachments so users can't simply double-click to open most attachments. *** Question #13:You claim you also protect my mail server. How? Answer:trimMail Inbox defangs email that could shutdown or take over your server. It blocks the outside world from using your email server as an open relay for spammers. It fends off dictionary-style and other Denial of Service attacks. And it keeps junk mailers from getting at your email server to hijack its mail addresses. *** Question #14:Am I required to enter all my users? Answer:No. *** Question #15:Will we need to create blacklists? Answer:trimMail Inbox already consults outside blacklists that are kept up to date 24/7. In addition, you can set up internal blacklist for those senders who aren't spammers, but you simply can't stand. We recommend you internally blacklist instead of unsubscribing from old mailing lists. Too often, UNSUBSCRIBE lists are sold to spammers for their STILL ALIVE lists. *** Question #16:How about white lists? Answer:Of course. Bypass lists, too. trimMail Inbox lets you create lists of trusted senders, who automatically get through, without scoring. You can also make a list of recipients for whom no messages are scored. By the way, you can use wildcards to blacklist, white list or bypass list by sender, user or domain. *** Question #17:Does trimMail Inbox use header analysis? And content filtering? Answer:Exhaustively. Ingeniously. *** Question #18:I've heard "reverse DNS lookup" is important. Do you do it? Answer:Wouldn't you? Yep. *** Question #19:What's the difference between trimMail Inbox and that $30,000 spam filter? Answer:Right now? About $27,000. Seriously? The BigBucks filter handles outbound mail as well and is sitting on about $3,000 worth of parts. Need to browbeat your in-house senders? trimMail Outbox will be available sometime in the fall, 2004. On the other hand, if you're itching to dump $30K for incoming mail, buy 10 trimMail Inboxes. They stack very nicely. And they will handle a ton of mail. *** Question #20:How will trimMail Inbox handle a message from a site like junkmail.com? Answer:Exactly like all other mail. trimMail Inbox will check with off-site sources, review the message contents, defang the message and score it as either junk or not. If you are having problems with a particular sender or domain, add them to your blacklist. *** Question #21:Can you specify which Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to monitor or is it by email address? Answer:You can allow specific users to receive virtually anything by entering them in the bypass list. Each Bypass List entry can be customized, like: thisuser@foobar.com, *@foobar.com, g*@foobar.com, webmaster@*.com, etc. To protect network integrity, even messages on your Bypass List will be subject to your global message defanging rules. *** Question #22:Does your box protect my Outlook Web Access users? Answer:trimMail Inbox filters messages coming into your Exchange server... or any other SMTP mail server. We do not care what e-mail clients you hang off your mail server, as long as they allow you to create custom rules, like Eudora, Netscape and Outlook. Of course, your e-mail clients must look to the servers we are protecting for their incoming mail. *** Question #23:Will this product work for Outlook 97 e-mail clients? Answer:Yes. See Question 35. *** Question #24:Our spam solution queries RBLs as one of its checks... However, after so many thousand checks, the checks start timing out and we have to reboot our firewall in order to get it to start checking for spam again... Answer:You can set RBL timeout with trimMail Inbox. More importantly, effective spam and content filtering is a really complex operation. It often demands more processing capacity than many firewalls, virus scanners or mail servers have available. That's why we believe you should isolate many of these processes on an independent appliance. You may have more problems than you think. *** Question #25:Emails coming from our ISP's backup mail server drop out before completion. The ISP claims the problem is not on their end, as they have other customers running Exchange 5.5 with no trouble. Input? Answer:Barring firewall miscues, a trimMail Inbox in front of your Exchange server will smooth out any SMTP rough-spots between Exchange and the store-and-forward server. In addition, with a service agreement you'll get the use of our perfectly-matched backup mail server for no extra charge... or finger-pointing. *** Question #26:This is an email proxy box right? I just have to redirect my external IP address to the trimMail Inbox internal IP address, and from there it will relay to my Exchange program. It could care less if I'm ruinning Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.0 right? Answer:Correct! As long as you are running a standard SMTP server in-house, trimMail Inbox can protect it from junkmail and other Bad Things. In addition, trimMail Inbox won't steal resources from your Exchange server... won't screw up your Service Paks or upgrades... and will never, ever trigger a BlueScreen Of Death. *** Question #27:If this unit ever goes down will it affect incoming and outgoing mail? Answer:Incoming? Yes. Incoming messages will be diverted to your backup mail server to be delivered when local service is restored. (If you have a trimMail Inbox Service Agreement, you automatically have backup mail service available to you.) If the problem is serious, you can simply restore the original mail server and DNS settings. Mail will dump directly to your mail server until your trimMail Inbox is ready to go again. *** Question #28:I'm currently running an Exchange environment and an iMail environment. Each environment has unique domain names. Can one trimMail Inbox protect both environments? Answer:As long as each e-mail server uses SMTP protocol, no problem. In fact, you could place your trimMail Inbox in Office Domain A, and cleanse mail for SMTP servers in Complex Domain B, Building Domain C, Hanger Domain D, etc. *** Question #29:Is it possible to tell trimMail Inbox to transfer mail tagged as spam to another machine (not the primary POP server) automatically? Answer:trimMail Inbox transfers messages to SMTP servers you specify. If a given e-mail server lets you create rules you can run on incoming e-mail, you can forward messages from that server. *** Question #30:Why does trimMail Inbox have only one 10/100 ethernet connection? Answer:Because that is all of the network resources it requires for TCP/IP communications. While routers, firewalls, hubs and switches sport multiple ethernet connections, network servers usually have one. Plug trimMail Inbox into a network switch or hub, just like your other network servers. *** Question #31:How do we configure the unit so that mail does not get relayed? Answer:Enter the hostname and domain for each e-mail server that is designated as the endpoint SMTP server for messages. Mail targeted for other destinations will not be forwarded. *** Question #32:What firewall ports should I open for trimMail Inbox? Answer:For day-to-day operation, trimMail Inbox needs port 25. It also needs to initiate http and dns requests. For management open port 10000. See Question 36. *** Question #33:Can this box be configured to receive on port 6000? We have incoming mail on port 6000 because Interscan VirusWall (Trendmicro) must use port 25. Answer:Set your firewall to direct port 25 traffic to trimMail Inbox. In trimMail Inbox's Mail Routing screen, list each domain, its mail server(s) and port 25. And don't forget to turn off tMI's virus scanning. *** Question #34:Can we configure a quarantine directory to check the mail being grabbed? We do not want the clients to see any spam or have any control over it. Answer:You can opt to kill all spam or tag it so your users can review and/or kill it. But as for as checking it... Most offices would need a full-time staff just to wade through the mountain of spam they receive. We don't get too many requests for that option. *** Question #35:We have a lot of different e-mail clients. Some can't handle hidden headers. Can trimMail Inbox identify a spam message by putting "spam" in the Subject line? Answer:We default to ">> JUNK >>" when you choose the Subject Line option. But if you prefer "This STINKS!" or "PeeU", it's up to you. See Question 23. *** Question #36:We prefer not to open any extraneous ports. Do we have to open port 10000? Answer:You need to open port 10000 only when you access the management screens for trimMail Inbox. See Question 32. *** Question #37:Our network is all fiber. How will trimMail Inbox work? Answer:It won't, unless you provide a switch, hub or other connection with a 10/100MB Ethernet port. *** Question #38:How can I receive an administrative copy of every message that passes through the system? Answer:Many email servers let you add alternate recipients for testing or archival purposes. *** Question #39:I'm running a Quickmail server. Will trimMail Inbox work with our Macintosh network? Answer:Absolutely. *** Question #40:I tried the server test, and never received the test message. What's going on? Answer:The mail server test is pretty hard to screw up. Possibilities:
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