Red Earth Policy Patrol – more info

Red Earth Policy Patrol 2.5 – more info

Perhaps no problem plagues the Internet as deeply as that of unsolicited junk E-mail, or SPAM. While there’s no doubt that SPAM can be annoying to the end users, SPAM can cause problems for both the network administrators and for those who own or manage a company. The reason for this is that SPAM robs your company of productivity and of system resources.
Red Earth Policy Patrol 2.5
One of the most cost effective spam controlling software is Policy Patrol by Red Earth Software.
Policy Patrol is a comprehensive e-mail-filtering tool that offers advanced anti-spam, anti-virus, content & attachment checking, disclaimers, archiving and reporting. Policy Patrol works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003/2000/5.5, Lotus Domino and any other SMTP mail server (found at http://www.policypatrol.comlink out ico).
Why use Policy Patrol to stop spam?
Policy Patrol offers a comprehensive and powerful set of features to help you put an end to unwanted mails, whilst keeping false positives at a minimum:

  • Policy Patrol combats spam by checking for spam words, spam headers, sender domains, sender IP addresses, number of recipients, language character sets, illegal HTML and the absence of a plain text body part.
  • Policy Patrol is one of the few products that can remove HTML tags before checking the e-mail text. Therefore the product is capable of successfully stopping spammers who try to circumvent content filters by placing HTML comment tags within the text.
  • Policy Patrol can make use of multiple spam black lists and uniquely includes the possibility to distinguish between messages originating from IP addresses on different lists.
  • Policy Patrol is the only product that offers the possibility to take different actions depending on the black list return (many lists include different returns, for instance to distinguish between verified or suspected open relays).
  • Policy Patrol can reject (i.e. not download) spam messages that originate from IPs on real-time black lists and therefore save bandwidth.
  • Policy Patrol is one of the few products that apart from rejecting, can also download messages originating from (certain) real-time black lists or open relay lists, and then take a specified action such as quarantine or delete (with the possibility to undelete). Although this method does not save any bandwidth, it allows you to ensure that no genuine messages are rejected.
  • In addition to rejecting spam messages, Policy Patrol can quarantine, add a tag or header, or delete spam messages (with the possibility to undelete).
  • By adding a header to spam messages, you can set up a rule in Outlook that places these messages in a ‘Spam’ folder for the user to review.
  • Messages tagged as spam can be forwarded to a public folder.
  • By configuring a notification message in Policy Patrol, senders of suspected spam messages can be notified that their message has been deleted or quarantined. In case the message has been falsely tagged as spam, the sender can contact your organization.
  • Policy Patrol can block mails that use certain character sets, for instance Chinese or Korean character sets.
  • Policy Patrol can be configured to block certain IP addresses or IP address ranges known to be spam senders.
  • Custom black lists and white lists can be configured. Optionally, Policy Patrol can automatically add domains or e-mail addresses to these lists when rules are triggered. For instance, Policy Patrol can add the recipient domain(s) to a white list each time your users send an e-mail, or Policy Patrol can automatically add the sending domain to a black list of identified spam mails.
  • Policy Patrol is one of the few products that can block NDR spam attacks.
  • Policy Patrol includes a sample spam word filter, but also allows you to customize and/or create your own filters.
  • Policy Patrol blocks spam at server level, saving you the installation of spam filtering software on the client machines.
  • By making use of customizable rules, spam-blocking features can be tweaked to suit your organization’s specific needs.

Policy Patrol 2.5 new features
Apart from support for Exchange 2003, Policy Patrol version 2.5 includes the following new features:

  • Check messages for character sets (useful for blocking spam mails).
  • Block single IP addresses or IP address ranges.
  • Display conditions found, including individual words and their score.
  • Password protection for local and remote Policy Patrol management.

At the moment, Policy Patrol is the only one-stop solution that can filter internal as well as external mails (if installed on Exchange Server 2000 or 2003), whilst offering a full feature set including spam black lists and disclaimer features, and the option to apply different rules depending on whether the mail is internal or external.
The product installs with relative ease and, with its pre-written sample polices, the administrator will be able to start protecting the network almost immediately.
Policy Patrol comes with a great choice of built-in filters and rules anyone can use, so basically it’ll run as installed out-of-the-box.
For example, click the following thumbnails for a view of some of the most useful filters:

  • Chain letters and hoaxes filter

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  • Spam words

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  • Offensive content

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  • Virus words

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and many more.
Policy Patrol also has many useful pre-set policies that allow the new installation to be put in place quickly and effectively while new policies are written.
Using filtering, Policy Patrol cuts down on false positives by allowing word scores to differentiate between certain phrases and words. Using this approach, an administrator can ensure minimal disruption is caused while still maintaining high standards of protection.
In all, this solution provides effective filtering and has the benefit of anti-virus to further protect your network from both known and potentially dangerous new threats, while ensuring that content is both legal and appropriate.

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