Norton Antivirus for Gateways

Once I purchased and installed ArgoSoft Pro, I was faced with the problem of viruses and spam. Yes, I had Norton Antivirus 2003 installed on my desktop systems (mine and my wife's). And, of course, I have a brain and installed the Outlook email security patch (SR-1) on our systems as well. This more or less means that my wife and I cannot receive viruses through email.

However, a successful virus attack would be devastating - kind of like a nuclear bomb going off (once it explodes, the damage is done and there's not much you can do about it). 

You see, I am in charge of the virus defenses at my office (a multi-billion dollar company) and I remember quite clearly the one and only time that we had a significant penetration. It was the "I Love You" virus, and it infected a dozen workstations before we could shut down our email servers. It took us over a week to purge the 50,000 email messages that had been created during a 15 minute period! It was quite a learning experience.

Thus I was determined (as I am at work) that no such outbreak would be even remotely possible. So I concluded it would be prudent to install virus protection for my new ArgoSoft Pro email system.

I read through the ArgoSoft web site and documentation, and soon learned that the product, like most email servers, does not really have a built-in anti-virus solution. I would have to find a third-party solution.

I chose Symantec Antivirus for SMTP Gateways because it had both antivirus and anti-spam features. 

I had used Symantec's products for years to stop nasty little bugs from creeping into networks with great success. I have a lot of trust of the products from this company - they haven't failed me yet.

In fact, I spent a great deal of time comparing all of the available antivirus solutions a few years ago. Norton came out ahead, partially because it has a great virus detection system and partially because it is the only product with a truly corporate management system. Norton is not the cheapest product, but it is, in my opinion, the best.

Anyway, back to email. The way these virus systems work for SMTP gateways is a little complex. You have to install the gateway on a different computer system (well, actually you can install it on the same one if you want, but it's better on a dedicated system). I had an old, 200 megahertz laptop sitting around doing nothing, so I set it up as my antivirus server.

I installed the product, then set it up to receive email. I modified the MX record for my domains to point to the new server, then configured the antivirus server to forward all messages (once scanned) to my ArgoSoft email server. 

I quickly found the antispam capabilities of this product were a little weak, so I installed yet another gateway, a specialized program called SpamFilter, in front of the antivirus system.

Did you get that? Email comes in from the internet. It first arrives at SpamFilter, which determines if the TCP/IP address of the sender of the email is blacklisted. If it is (meaning the sender is a spammer or an open relay), then the email is discarded.

Emails now go from the SpamFilter program to the Antivirus program (these are on the same server). Norton scans the message and removes any viruses (the message might be deleted at this point).

The messages now get forwarded to ArgoSoft pro, which stores them on it's own POP3 database until I read them in my email client.

Each of these three SMTP servers (SpamFilter, Norton Antivirus for SMTP Gateways and ArgoSoft Pro) is secured against being an open relay. This is critical for protection from abuse by spammers (they often attempt to "take over" an email server for their own purposes).

The end result? Almost no spam and no viruses.