MPP and Beyond

I have come to the realization that we have done a really bad job of telling the world how great MPP is for SMTP scanning gateways. For years we have been talking about securing email servers with MPP, but with the exception of our Communigate Pro customers, the majority of our big deals are for SMTP scanning gateways. Alternately, we lose deals because our customers seem focused on MPP as an email server tool and not as a gateway product. This is purely due to obfuscated messaging, and now we intend to change this by emphasizing what makes MPP so great for SMTP scanning gateways.

Top reasons that MPP is great for SMTP gateways:

1) MPP is a software solution. hy overpay for bad hardware from email appliances when servers are so affordable now? MPP is available as a VMWare virtual appliance or you can install the components on your own.

2) MPP works with open source AND commercial component technologies. MPP does a whole lot on it’s own, but it can also add open source and commercial virus and spam scanners into the mix. If you are on a tight budget or you love constant tinkering you can use SpamAssassin, but if you need a lot of throughput and accuracy we have great alternatives. Changing engines is generally just a checkbox and all other settings remain unchanged. This is a huge time save.

3) MPP offers the highest level of spam filtering accuracy you will find. It will far surpass stock SpamAssassin.

4) MPP has integrated SMTP and Content based defenses. MPP can do many pre-queue tests and also scan the content of messages if need be. If you are using Amavisd with Postfix you probably have a policy daemon and content filters that are completely independent. MPP has the only integrated policy server and content filter that I know of.

5) All configurations can be defined on a per-domain basis with our policy-engine. Every option in MPP can be defined in a policy-group and applied to a domain, group of email addresses or IP’s. You can add MPP policy group name to your subscriber directory and we can query via LDAP.

6) MPP has a great interface, qReview, for end-users to review email archives and spam quarantines and make basic settings. QReview is multi-domain so you can have different authentication information for each domain. QReview also has multiple levels of administrators so you can define domain level or peer administrators.

7) MPP has a combination of compliance features not found in ANY open source SMTP gateway such as archive and retrieval, content filtering, surveillance, If you think you are satisfying compliance requirements with bcc: think again. If you can’t quickly search and retrieve your email archives you haven’t satisfied any compliance standard that I know of.

MPP is especially great for replacing AmavisD when you have reached the limits of AmavisD in terms of performance or spam filtering accuracy of if you need end-user spam quarantine management.

9) MPP does tons of stuff that has nothing to do with virus or spam filtering and it’s all built in. What kind of stuff? Attachment stripping, adding disclaimers, header filtering, attachment filtering, access-controls (limit who speaks to who) and tons of other email utility features.

10) MPP has security intelligence built in to automatically block dictionary attacks, find outbound spammers and automatically block abusive senders or receivers. These tools alone can stop hundreds of thousands of messages a day on a busy proxy with very minimal resources.

11) MPP allows you to build custom spam scoring algorithms to build scores based on an amalgamation of individual tests. This allows you to do things like RBL’s without making reject decisions

12) MPP works with an MTA and works best with Postfix, though Sendmail, Qmail and Exim are fine alternatives.

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