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Texas CISV Catalog

Computer Mail Services Inc

Since its founding in 1982, Computer Mail Services, Inc. (CMS), a private company based in Southfield, Michigan, has been a leader in the development of messaging products for corporate, educational and non-profit environments and programs around the world.

Product Overview

Product Features & Benefits

System Requirements

Praetor for Exchange Datasheet

Praetor for Lotus Notes Datasheet

Praetor for SMTP Datasheet

 

 

 

Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, and Content Filtering Gateway

Praetor G2

 

Product Overview

Praetor is a messaging firewall providing antispam, email content security and antivirus to Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino or other SMTP-based servers

Excelling at detecting email containing common spammer tactics, Praetor's design is based upon the premise that advanced spam filtering (Praetor's better Bayesian, heuristics) and with the added flexibility of defining custom rules is what email administrators really need.  Praetor's flexibility can define conditions beyond simple message body and subject line checks.

Praetor is installed as a Windows 2000/2003 service, and conceptually becomes a messaging firewall for your site. Praetor receives Internet mail and performs the tactical gauntlet of tests to detect and eliminate/quarantine objectionable email. Only those messages that are deemed to be acceptable will be relayed for delivery.

Praetor offers the ultimate protection for your user population. With its ease and flexibility in creating rules specific to your own site experiences, the filtering it provides will be tuned to your needs. Using it will help your company to greatly reduce Spam, secure intellectual property, reduce exposure to legal liability in this age of lawsuits filed over hazardous work environment of a sexually threatening nature, and even block email-borne viruses.

CMS knows that Praetor compares favorably with any competing filtering product on the market.

People interested in Praetor should use this list to do a point-by-point comparison between Praetor and other products.  CMS believes that Praetor provides the most cost-effective email protection.

Product Features and Benefits

FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

Customer support

Highly rated

 

CMS' Support Staff has received praise from customers for years.

Rule Wizard

YES

 

Rule creation is simple and provides new capabilities to reflect your own experiences; especially useful for creating rules that deal with business issues other than spam filtering

Rule script language accessible by customer's programmers

YES, VBScript

 

For the ultimate in custom rules, edit the script to add your own special functions and create new applications that use email as a triggering event

Different rules for different users

YES

 

Assign rules to departments, groups, and/or individuals

Individual rule enable/disable starting with the very next message processed

YES

 

No disruptions to services

Rule templates

YES

 

Easily create variants of an existing rule

Allow for rule exceptions

YES

 

Increase rule flexibility by providing exceptions to the conditions

Auto notifications for rejected messages

YES

 

Send a notice that the message was unacceptable to the admin, sender, recipient, any email address, or any combination of those

Auto re-route to a different address other than the intended recipient

YES

 

Send notice to the compliance officer or censor, and do not deliver to the intended recipient

Admin console to manage quarantined mail for all users

YES

 

Ease of administration

Log Viewer administrator access via web browser

YES

 

Remotely review and release quarantined mail for any user

Web browser access for users to review and release personal quarantined mail

YES

 

Eliminate administrators' burden by letting users review and release their quarantined messages

Automatic message management

YES

 

Create rules to automatically delete email meeting your criteria

GUI configuration interface

YES

 

Admin-friendly look and feel 

Scalable distributed architecture

YES

 

Fully multi-threaded, grows with your business and can be distributed across multiple filtering machines while accessing common log and token databases

Automatic daily maintenance tasks

YES

 

Use Windows task scheduler to age and purge old message files that were archived and quarantined, reducing administrator involvement

PROTECTION      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

E-mail content filter

YES

 

Filter SMTP traffic transmitted to and from your network

Lexical scanning

YES via custom VB script code

 

Custom script to provide keyword scanning specific to your business

Keyword weighting

YES

 

Assign scores to keywords and restrict messages that exceed a specific total score

Filter for authorized senders/receivers

YES

 

Limit distribution of confidential files to authorized persons

Manage attachments by file type and name

YES, even use regular expressions

 

Filter images, music, audio, executables, games, etc.

Manage messages and attachments by size

YES

 

Reject, quarantine, re-direct or archive messages based on your acceptable use  

Manage by textual content: Subject line

YES

   

Manage by textual content: Message body

YES

   

Manage by textual content: Attachment

YES

   

Manage by number of recipients

YES

   

Manage by number of attachments

YES

   

Manage domain name and email address

YES

   

ESMTP support

YES with auto fallback to SMTP

 

Block excessively large messages

SPAM DETECTION      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

Bayesian content filter

YES

 

Advanced statistical technique to detect spam.  Default token database has >92% spam detection rate with false positive rate of less than 0.5%

Train the Bayesian content filter

YES

 

Improve spam detection accuracy by training the Bayesian filter with your own spam and good message samples

Heuristic content filter

YES

 

Advanced weighted rules allow scoring of the message header and body for the presence of different spam techniques

Advanced spam filtering using studied spam techniques

YES >12 supplied

 

Review of thousands of spam samples to deduce complex combinations of conditions beyond simplistic "Free cash" string searches

Anti-spam rules-based capability 

YES

 

Customizable spam source blocking using your own rules

Custom lists

YES

 

Create your own lists and use to test against selectable message header fields

Weighted words list to create new custom rules

YES

 

Allows for a custom rule to score based on phrases found in the message body

DNS blackhole listservers

YES, multiple

 

Realtime DNS blackhole lists such as MAPS RBL, Spamhaus, etc.  Praetor can query more than one such blackhole list.

Bypass list for DNS blackhole list

YES

 

Bypass list allows message reception from trading partners even if their mail servers are being blacklisted

Ignored IP list for trusted servers

YES

 

Correctly identify the IP address of the true external source even when Praetor is several hops downstream of the message point of entry; in this way, the correct IP address will be checked against the DNSBL

Trusted IP list for internal servers YES   IP whitelist for internal mail servers to bypass all filtering. Adding external servers is dangerous since there is no checking for dangerous attachments.

Relay block / anti-relay

YES

 

Prevents spammers from using you as a relay host

Allow relaying exceptions 

YES

 

Allows relaying to trusted organizations.  Praetor permits specific IP address or an IP address range for each exception.

Detect and eliminate Reverse NDR attack

YES

 

Rule to handle this form of spammer attack that makes your mail server into an unwitting indirect mail relay

Detect e-mail spoofing

YES

 

Detect when mail is from anonymous sources

Detect advance fee fraud 

YES

 

Detect common scams to obtain company banking information (Ex: Nigerian 419)

Detect URL obfuscation

YES

 

Detect common spammer technique that try to hide their URL typically because it is pornographic

Detect suspicious spam address

YES

 

Detect bogus sender addresses that spammers programmatically generate

Detect externally referenced pages

YES

 

Detect common spammer technique that refer to external pages and graphics to deliver content while actual text is nonsense

Detect variable content in message

YES

 

Detect common spammer technique to embed URLs for opting out that contain information to identify the recipient

Detect embedded and encoded content

YES

 

Detect sophisticated spammer technique that can bypass most filters

ANTIVIRUS      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

Virus detection at the Gateway

YES

 

Identify and quarantine viruses before they enter the network.  This is performed more efficiently by testing attachments against a banned or suspicious list of filename and/or extension patterns.  This method has been 100% effective since Praetor was introduced in 1999.

Anti-virus keyword and code command scanning

YES

 

Identify new viruses by name, subject or 'harmful' code

Anti-virus filtering by attachment type

YES

 

Filter new virus attachments by the file type until your virus scanner is updated

CONTROL / MAIL MANAGEMENT      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

E-mail logging in real-time

YES

 

Watch email traffic flow in realtime

E-mail logging to SQL database

YES

 

Uses free Microsoft SQL Desktop Edition (MSDE) or SQL Server

Detailed and customizable Reports

YES

 

Allows management insight into e-mail usage patterns.  MS Access source code provided for modification of report format.

Identify problem or suspect users

YES

 

Reports show who are the most prolific users

Identify problem or suspect mail sources

YES

 

Reports show IP addresses that are sources for the most frequent violations based on tests of DNSBL, Reverse NDR, or other Praetor rules

Comprehensive message traffic logging

YES

 

Records all e-mail traffic information across days, weeks, etc.

Message stamping

YES

 

Add disclaimers to messages.  Praetor's rule-based approach allows you to have different disclaimers for different conditions.

Send notification of attachment being quarantined

YES

 

Send notices to administrator, sender, intended recipient, or any specified email address

Different disclaimer based upon specific condition

YES

 

Stamp messages specific to particular departments for branding, etc.

Disclaimer at beginning or end of message

YES

 

Configure where on a message the stamp appears

HTML for disclaimer

YES

 

Easy configuration of fonts, colors, sizes, etc. for stamps

Use your email editor to create HTML

Ability to prepend or append the subject

YES

 

Allows more information to be passed to the local recipient in the message

Ability to pass on the original message while inserting a notice of the triggered rule and specific reason, etc. as part of the notice text

YES

 

Allows more information to be passed to the local recipient in the message

Ability to add message header with rule and the specific reason the message is filtered

YES

 

Allows more information to be passed to the local recipient in the message

Ability to add new X- message header

YES, up to 3 new X-headers lines

 

Allows more information to be passed to the local recipient in the message

Need to delay transmission for large message

NO

 

This is unnecessary due to multi-threaded and multi-processor architecture.

Delay sending of large messages for off peak times - a feature that is especially needed if the SMTP transmitter is single threaded in nature

Auto-replies based on conditions you specify

YES

 

Send auto responses to emails based on keywords

Run external VB script code

YES

 

Create commands to call pagers, cellphones, etc.

Operational logging

YES

 

Services log their activity to aid troubleshooting 

Can the correct DNSBL query be performed when the antispam product is not at the Internet boundary and so does not receive mail directly from the sending mail host?

YES

 

Useful for determining true source of spam and attack for blacklisting, instead of trusted mail servers within your network or at the ISP

QUARANTINE MANAGEMENT      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

Review summary of quarantined messages from the Praetor administration tool

YES

 

Review all quarantined messages to see who sends them, who are the recipients, size, subject, etc.

User review of personal quarantined messages via web browser

YES

 

Review of personal email that was quarantined with ability to release it.  Filters are available to specify the sender address and subject.

Record the reason for the messages to be quarantined

YES

 

Identify the rule that quarantined the message and the specific reason showing any disallowed strings

Review contents of quarantined messages

YES

 

View the actual quarantined message itself

Actions to dispose of quarantined messages

Accept, Reject, Redirect, Return-to-Sender

 

How simply can the messages be disposed and what actions to take upon them

Message templates for return-to-sender response

YES

 

For simplicity, you can return a message to its sender by using a pre-written template

Optional actions to add to whitelist

YES,
domain names

 

Add the sender domain to the whitelist used for avoiding quarantine in the future

Optional actions to add to blacklist

YES,
domain names and IP addresses

 

Add the sender domain and IP address to the blacklist to avoid receiving email in the future

User ability to add to personal whitelist of email address or domain NO, very dangerous   Present-day viruses forge sender addresses and adding to the whitelist opens users to receiving infections from someone who appears within their personal network of correspondents. Praetor whitelist entries can only be added by the administrator.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS AND REPORTS      
FEATURE PRAETOR G2   BENEFITS AND COMMENTS

Show who receives the most email

YES

 

Identify potential abusers of email

Show who sends the most email

YES

 

Identify potential abusers of email

Show what domains receive the most email from your users

YES

 

Identify possible leaks of confidential information to your competitors

Show what domains send the most email from your users

YES

   

Show what rules catch the most spam

YES

 

Refine your rules' effectiveness

Show IP source and frequency of DNSBL rejections

YES

 

Put the most active sources onto the SMTP Server's banned IP list

Show IP source and frequency of Reverse NDR attacks

YES

 

Put the most active sources onto the SMTP Server's banned IP list

Show IP source and frequency of messages triggering active rules

YES

 

Identify source of banned content such as viral infection or pornography

Show summary statistics of your email traffic YES   Identify what rules filtered spam, accepted non-spam messages, caused false positives (if any)

 

System Requirements

 

Before Praetor can be installed, the machine must have the following:

  •  
Machine with Pentium IV or Xeon CPU operating at 1.5GHz or faster, 512MB RAM or more, and at least 10GB free disk space
  •  
Windows 2000 or 2003 Server, Windows 2000 or XP Professional Edition
  •  
Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 or later
Exchange Server v5.5, 2000 or 2003 (v5.5 requires a separate Praetor machine)
  •  
IIS SMTP and Web Servers or Exchange 200x
  •  
Microsoft SQL Server or Desktop Edition (MSDE)
  •  
Microsoft Visual Basic Script DLL version 5.6 or later
  •  

Dedicated connection to the Internet

   
Recommendations

The following are the recommended minimum recommendations for Praetor G2 installations.

They are based upon the number of email users and assume an average inbound total email volume of 50 messages per day per user.  

CMS realizes that your company may have different needs that require different configurations. 

To further discuss how to fit Praetor.G2 into your email system, please contact us.
  SITE SIZE CPU GHz RAM FREE STORAGE WINDOWS DATABASE SERVER
  10 - 49 Pentium IV 1.5 GHz 512 MB 10 GB Pro Edition MSDE
  50 - 99 Pentium IV 2.0 GHz 1 GB 15 GB Server Edition MSDE
  100-249 Pentium IV 2.6 GHz 1 GB 20 GB Server Edition SQL Server
  250 - 999 Pentium IV or Xeon >3 GHz 1 GB 40 GB Server Edition Separate SQL Server
  1000+ Multiple Pentium IV or Xeon CPUs in a cluster >3 GHz 2 GB Clustered disk array Server Edition Separate SQL Server