Filter
Top Products
Anti-Spam
834
SonicOS 5.8.1 Administrator Guide
What is Anti-Spam?
The Anti-Spam feature provides a quick, efficient, and effective way to add anti-spam, anti-
phishing, and anti-virus capabilities to your existing SonicWALL UTM appliance.
In a typical configuration of Anti-Spam, the administrator chooses to add Anti-Spam capabilities
by selecting it in the SonicOS interface and licensing it. The SonicWALL UTM appliance then
uses the same advanced spam-filtering technology as the SonicWALL Email Security products
to reduce the amount of junk email the organization delivers to users.
There are two primary ways inbound messages are analyzed by the Anti-Spam feature -
Advanced IP Reputation Management and Cloud-based Advanced Content Management. IP
Address Reputation uses the GRID Network to identify the IP addresses of known spammers,
and reject any mail from those senders without even allowing a connection. GRID Network
Sender IP Reputation Management checks the IP address of incoming connecting requests
against a series of lists and statistics to ensure that the connection has a probability of
delivering valuable email. The lists are compiled using the collaborative intelligence of the
SonicWALL GRID Network. Known spammers are prevented from connecting to the
SonicWALL UTM appliance, and their junk email payloads never consume system resources
on the targeted systems.
Email that does not come from known spammers is analyzed based on “GRIDprints” generated
by SonicWALL’s research laboratories and are based on data from millions of buiness
endpoints, hundreds of millions of messages, and billions of reputation votes from the users of
the GRID Network. Our Grid Network uses data from multiple SonicWALL solutions to create a
collaborative intelligence network that defends against the worldwide threat landscape.
GRIDprints uniquely identify messages without exposing data contained in the email message.
The Anti-Spam service determines that an email fits only one of the following threats: Spam,
Likely Spam, Phishing, Likely Phishing, Virus, or Likely Virus. It uses the following precedence
order when evaluating threats in email messages:
• Phishing
• Likely Phishing
• Virus
• Spam
• Likely Spam
• Likely Virus
For example, if a message is both a virus and a sp
am, the message will be categorized as a
virus since virus is higher in precedence than spam.
If the Anti-Spam service determines that the message is not any of the above threats, it is
judged as good email and is delivered to the destination server.
Benefits
Adding anti-spam protection to your SonicWALL UTM appliance increases the efficiency of
your system as a whole by filtering and rejecting junk messages before users see them in their
inboxes.
• Reduced amount of bandwidth and resources consumed by junk email in your network
• Reduced number of incoming messages sent to the mail server
• Reduced threat to the organization, because users cannot accidentally infect their
computers by clicking on virus spam