We have found that most people have a problem with unsolicited email, or spam, clogging their email inboxes.  Viruses spread by email are another problem.  These often spread by sending copies of themselves to everyone in your address book.

Whether you are in business, or a personal email user, spam and email viruses waste time, damage systems and reduce credibility with those who you communicate with.  In our business, we use two Firetrust products called Mailwasher Pro and Benign to protect our inboxes.

Mailwasher Pro allows you to download the headers from emails, and then decide whether to delete, bounce or retain an email before retrieving it from your server. It makes an assessment whether the email is legitimate or likely to be spam, a virus or a chain letter.  If you choose to bounce the email, it appears to the sender that the email is undeliverable so that they may remove you from their lists.  You can define certain senders as friends, or place unwanted senders on a blacklist.

Mailwasher Pro is also handy for managing multiple inboxes.  We use it to monitor 12 mailboxes, and it presents all emails together on one page, where we can preview them.  It also works with web based email such as Hotmail.

Benign (or B9) sits between your mail boxes and your server and filters out anything that is not a standard component of any email (such as viruses, or 1 x 1 pixel images that return data to the sender).  This approach means that any sort of present or future virus is screened out without the need to continually update virus definitions.  You do need to change the server definitions for each email account by adding .b9 to the end of your server name for incoming mail (e.g. mail.yourhost.com is changed to mail.yourhost.com.b9).

Both packages are excellent value for money and you can download free 30 day trial versions from Firetrust prior to purchase.