FAQ

All Mailscreen online email security services are designed to deliver enterprise-grade service and performance, without enterprise-level complexity and cost. Our services offer easy administration and use, are backed by industry-leading online threat expertise, and are highly effective in protecting businesses from a wide range of email threats.

• Mailscreen Email Defense Service - Our managed email security service offers comprehensive protection against a wide range of email threats using a combination of proven spam filters, leading anti-virus engines, fraud protection, content filtering, and email attack protection.
• Mailscreen Disaster Recovery Services - Our robust disaster recovery services - Mailscreen Message Continuity and the Mailscreen Fail Safe Service - provide email communications continuity for businesses in the event of planned or unplanned outages.
• Mailscreen Email Archiving - Mailscreen Email Archiving is an easy and effective solution for businesses that are required to monitor, store and retrieve company email messages in order to comply with electronic security regulations.

The Mailscreen technology is powered by McAfee®, the world-leading actor in the online security area. The system is managing 100s of Millions email messages on a daily basis for over 35000 customers (organizations, state and local governments and educations institutions) with millions of users.

You can find out more information about Mailscreen email security solutions by:

• completing an online inquiry form,
• calling +46-8-544 406 00
• completing an online demo form – requesting an online demonstration
• completing an online contact me form - requesting to be contacted by Mailscreen

Email Security delivered in the Cloud as a managed service provides higher security to a lower total cost and risk. Your need to purchase your own software and hardware disappears and there is no requirement to have internal personnel that monitors the systems 24/7/365. You don’t need to purchase expensive upgrades and continuously educate your staff in email security.

You get spared from large up-front investments of software and hardware with the potential risk of getting a vendor lock-in due to the difficulty to motivate a future change based on the high initial investments.

The Mailscreen Email Defense Service offers far more than traditional spam and virus prevention. Our focus is on providing a complete email defense using a combination of proven spam filters, leading anti-virus engines, fraud protection, content filtering, and email attack protection.

The Email Defense Service is easy to administer and use, and was developed to meet the email security needs of businesses that require enterprise-grade service and performance, without enterprise-level complexity and cost. Delivering powerful email threat protection at the network perimeter, the Email Defense Service identifies, quarantines, blocks and strips suspect email messages before they can enter or leave an organization’s messaging infrastructure.

Key features included are:

• Spam Blocking — Block over 99 percent of spam and eliminate associated costs
• Virus and Worm Scanning — Integrate maximum protection against virus outbreaks
• Outbound Message Filtering — Protect corporate integrity by establishing sent file policies
• Fraud Protection — Protect your network and your employees from the risks of phishing
• Email Attack Protection — Shield your network from vulnerability and attack
• Content and Attachment Filtering — Reduce corporate liability and risk, while increasing corporate spam control
• Centralized administration — Manage email defense easily and effectively
• Quarantine management — Customize how quarantined mail is handled
• Around-the-clock email security — Stay safe knowing that Mailscreen protects you from all e-mail borne threats.

Organizations can also secure their email assets with one of our robust Mailscreen Disaster Recovery Services, which protect businesses from the loss of emails during unplanned outages or regularly scheduled maintenance. Both Mailscreen Message Continuity and the Mailscreen Fail Safe Service engage automatically whenever Mailscreen detects a loss in email server connectivity and begin spooling messages. Message Continuity also help businesses to keep the lines of communication open during outages by providing threat-free, Web-based email access, management and use.

Mailscreen has a number of “industry firsts” under its belt including:

• First managed service provider to introduce Bayesian statistical classification
• First managed service provider to offer spam beacon and web bug blocking
• First managed service provider to offer quarantine management via email
• First managed service provider to deliver a solution for tracking URL click-throughs from email to the Web
• Patented method of identifying and controlling spam, which uses a voting algorithm based on fuzzy logic, a sophisticated form of statistical mathematics, to achieve more than 99 percent accuracy

In order to test the Mailscreen Email Defense Services you just submit the “Free Trial” form on our website. When the test account has been activated the only action required by you is to redirect your organizations mail exchange (MX) record to Mailscreen – a simple and straightforward process.

The trial is free of charge and it is not related with any requirement for future commitments. However we are confident that after testing the Mailscreen Service, you will be convinced that this is “the” Email Security Solution for your organization. Of course, the transition from trial to an active user account is managed smoothly.

Primary to Mailscreen Email Defense Service effectiveness is our Stacked Classification Framework® spam detection system, which utilizes a patented method of identifying and controlling spam using a voting algorithm based on a sophisticated form of intelligent reasoning to achieve more than 99 percent accuracy. The spam detection system aggregates the most effective spam filters and techniques in the industry, which contribute to the accuracy of our service and industry low false-positive rates. Using this multi-layered filtering approach, Mailscreen can dynamically calculate the spam probability of every message and instantly block over 99 percent of spam at the network perimeter.

Yes, the Mailscreen method of filtering from spam, viruses and other threats is based on a proprietary solution, which provides a higher level of protection in comparison to competitors that are basing their solutions on “Open Source” code – which is available for everyone to download ( of course also the Spammers).

The Mailscreen Email Defense Service received five stars, the highest available rating, in the VeriTest Anti-Spam Benchmark Service™ Summer 2005 Report. The high rating was a result of the solution’s performance in the vendor-tuned portion of the independent test, in which it posted a 99.76 percent Spam Capture Rate. Mailscreen posted a Spam Capture Rate of 99.71 in the "out-of-the-box" configuration.

Yes. One of the most significant threats to the enterprise comes in the form of denial of service attacks, dictionary and directory harvest attacks, mail bombs, email flooding and other attacks designed to interrupt service or collect corporate or personal email addresses. Mailscreen Email Attack Protection removes the threat of network probes like spam beacons and completely shields your network from vulnerability and devastating email attacks.

Using a comprehensive email defense service allows businesses to automatically protect their networks from the productivity and IT-draining effects of unwanted email. In fact, the Email Defense Service filters over 99 percent of spam, translating into a 90 percent reduction in spam-related costs.

No. The Mailscreen perimeter-based Email Defense Service is often misunderstood and viewed the same as an outsourced service when, in fact, the two are quite different. Mailscreen neither accepts nor denies the delivery of email to your Message Transfer Agent (MTA), but instead, filters your email before it enters your network; enabling you to retain 100 percent control of your data. With Mailscreen, you never give up the management of your email servers, or redirect email policy or the management of email policy from your company to an outside organization. Your mail remains 100 percent under your control, yet your infrastructure and domain is completely protected because the Mailscreen service cloaks your messaging environment from the Internet and the threats it can harbor and transmit via email.

Customers can be provisioned for the Mailscreen Email Defense Service in as little as 15 minutes after receiving the necessary account provisioning guidelines and information. The only action required on the part of the customer is to redirect their mail exchange (MX) record to Mailscreen – a simple and straightforward process.

Mailscreen makes email defense easy, flexible and effective. Within the Mailscreen Control Console®, our Web-based administrative portal, the administrator and end user can select from a set of definable parameters to tailor the filtering capabilities of the system. As an administrator, Mailscreen offers the ability to manage allow and deny lists, exempt users, a recipient shield, anti-spam, anti-virus, content, attachment, and HTML parameters. As an end user, we allow the ability to manage personal allow and deny lists to fine-tune the filtering to meet specific needs. Additional permissions can be offered to the end-user population at the discretion of the administrator.

Yes. Organizations that require a greater level of security for inbound and outbound email traffic can feel confident in Mailscreen’s Transport Level Security (TLS) protocol. Mailscreen accepts and filters encrypted inbound and outbound messages and delivers them across a secure tunnel when recipients are TLS enabled. If a recipient is unable to receive a TLS encrypted tunnel, Mailscreen will deliver the message via standard SMTP.

Yes. Mailscreen serves businesses of all sizes, all over the world. The managed service is particularly valuable to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which traditionally lack the necessary IT resources required for administration of an effective, up-to-date email defense. The Mailscreen Email Defense Service is in-dependent on what e-mail servers or clients that are used by our customers. The only requirement for your organization is to have its own domain.

The Mailscreen Email Defense Service is packaged and price in four solution bundles:

• Mailscreen SaaS Email Protection & Continuity: Our most comprehensive package includes powerful email security plus Mailscreen Message Continuity, which provides email storage and Web-based email access and use during outages.
• Mailscreen SaaS Email Protection: A robust package of email threat services and the Mailscreen Fail Safe Service, our storage-only disaster recovery service.
• Mailscreen Email Inbound Filtering: An ideal package for businesses that only require advanced protection against inbound email threats.
• Mailscreen Enterprise Defense Plus:This package allows organizations of all sizes to customize the Email Defense Service to meet their unique email threat and disaster recovery needs.

A mail exchange (MX) record is simply an entry in a domain name database that identifies the email server responsible for handling email for that domain - similar to a primary postal address. With the Mailscreen service, you re-direct your MX record to Mailscreen so all email from the outside go through Mailscreen and its filtering process before it is delivered to your actual address.

No. The Mailscreen message processing centers act as proxies when receiving your inbound email. Messages are filtered in real-time as they are instantly delivered into your messaging environment. Because Mailscreen ‘s service is proxy-based, your messages are not stored to disk so there is no risk of lost, damaged or corrupted email.

No. The MX record remains in your control. At anytime your MX record may be configured to point back to your messaging infrastructure. You may also lower your MX record's time-to-live (TTL) to increase propagation times.

Mailscreen schedules weekly enhancements during our regular maintenance window. Enhancements are automatically applied to the service during this maintenance window. All email is still processed and filtered during this time. During the upgrade maintenance window, only access to the Mailscreen Control Console service configuration and reporting portal is unavailable.

Unlike a number of companies, Mailscreen does not use a "store and forward" process for filtering messages which involves accepting your email, storing it on servers, scanning it, and then sending it on. Instead, Mailscreen’s proxy-based method filters email real-time - filtering all mail processing via memory and only storing quarantined mail to hard disk.

Yes. Group policies management from Mailscreen enables customer administrators to create user groups, and to subscribe each user group to a particular set of filtering policies. Organizations can tailor message filtering policies within each policy set to meet the specific needs of user groups, such as organizational units like accounts payable, sales or engineering, or may create and set policies for an individual user.

Mailscreen‘s multi-layered Stacked Classification Framework provides over 99 percent filtering accuracy and an industry-leading low false positive rate (legitimate email incorrectly marked as spam). In the rare event of a false positive, Mailscreen provides each end-user with a daily spam quarantine report that enables end-users to locate any legitimate emails, release them to their inbox, and ensure that those messages are not blocked in the future. Furthermore, to enable certain types of content and attachments to pass through Mailscreen’s filters, any allow lists, deny lists, or keyword lists that have been developed specifically by Mailscreen customers can be uploaded to the Mailscreen Control Console to enable customized, regulation-compliant message filtering.

Yes - powering Mailscreen’s online security solutions is the Mailscreen powered by McAfee® Threat Center. The Threat Center combines advanced, accurate and up-to-the-minute automated technology with the intelligence and hands-on monitoring of seasoned messaging security experts. Within our sophisticated streaming data environment, our technologists and our technology monitor the Web for threats 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Yes. Mailscreen utilizes firewalls at the network level for intrusion detection.

Yes. As patches and updates become available they are tested and implemented on a fast-track basis. Mailscreen maintains connections to a number of sources for updates and is, therefore, informed as soon as these patches and updates become available.

Mailscreen performs real-time monitoring on its security infrastructure.

Mailscreen performs the following activities:

• Review of security and activity events logs
• Investigation of operational anomalies
• Routine review of systems and application access levels
• Automated security analysis