# Introduction

Spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) accounts for 15% of all messages and is rapidly increasing. 1 in 150 messages contains a virus, costing many billions of dollars around the world every year. Surveys have shown that removing 1 virus from 1 PC costs over $600.

MailScanner is already a highly-respected open source e-mail security system, with more users than AOL and Hotmail combined, and this new release increases its stability and performance. It processes 750 million e-mail messages every day, removing 3 million viruses and identifying 300 million spam messages. MailScanner is used at over 30,000 sites around the world protecting top government departments, commercial corporations and educational institutions. It is becoming a standard feature of many ISP's as virus protection and spam filtering are now essential requirements for most users.

MailScanner scans all e-mail for viruses, spam and attacks against security vulnerabilities. It is not tied to any particular virus scanner, but can be used with any combination of 14 different virus scanners, allowing sites to choose the "best of breed" virus scanner. Being open source, site administrators can audit and verify the integrity of the system. Its role is a major part in the security of a network, and so it must act as a trusted service. The only way to achieve the required level of trust is to be open source, an approach the commercial suppliers are not willing to take. MailScanner has been developed in a world-leading Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, and is distributed for *FREE* under the GNU Public Licence.

- Scans e-mail for viruses using any combination of up to 14 different virus scanners
- Automatically updates all installed virus scanners every hour, by default
- Identifies over 95% of spam using several techniques, including highly advanced heuristics
- Spam can be tagged, rejected, discarded, archived or forwarded to other addresses for inspection by administrators
- Pornographic spam can be stripped of all graphical content, protecting users from obscene content
- Scans e-mail for attacks against known and unknown security vulnerabilities in popular e-mail applications, automatically correcting messages "on the fly" whenever possible and quarantining dangerous sections of other messages
- Highly scalable: 1 PC can process over 1.5 million e-mail messages per day
- Robust: Protects itself against "Denial of Service" attacks and operating system resource leaks
- Highly configurable, providing ISP's and ASP's with the possibility of using thousands of different rules and configurations for any combination of users or domains
- Easy to set up as all configuration options are supplied with "sensible" defaults

To find out more, visit the web site at www.mailscanner.info or contact the team directly at MailScanner@MailScanner.info.

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