Block unwanted email

Symantec Brightmail Gateway provides several features that let you block email from entering your network. When you block unwanted email, you reduce your risk of getting a virus. You also reduce the resources that are needed to scan messages.

See About blocking and allowing messages at connection time.

Create policy groups and policies

You can manage users through policy groups. You can specify these groups of users according to email addresses, domain names, or LDAP groups. Then you can apply filtering policies to specific policy groups. Symantec Brightmail Gateway installs with a Default policy group that consists of all of the users.

See About policy groups.

Detect spam

Symantec Brightmail Gateway can detect spam with a high level of accuracy. Depending on your settings you can:

• Define policies for handling the messages that are identified as spam and set thresholds for suspected spam.

• Store spam messages in Spam Quarantine until they can be reviewed. If you configure user access to Spam Quarantine, recipients receive notification when they have messages in their quarantine. Users can then review these messages and take appropriate action.

• Configure Symantec Brightmail Gateway to allow messages from specified domains to bypass antispam scanning altogether.

  See About filtering spam.

  See About quarantining spam.

• Participate in Symantec's Probe Network and further improve spam filtering effectiveness.

  See About probe accounts.

Detect viruses and other malicious attacks

You can create policies and configure settings to detect viruses and other malicious attacks.

See About detecting viruses and malicious attacks.

Filtering messages to enforce content policies

Keyword dictionaries and templates help you create the policies that filter the email messages. Such policies can be used to monitor and enforce compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements and to prevent data loss.

See About content filtering.

Detect IM threats

Symantec Brightmail Gateway offers enterprises a gateway-based instant messaging (IM) traffic filter solution. Along with its email security solutions, Symantec Brightmail Gateway provides threat protection solutions to your enterprise for IM through the features and settings.

See About IM.

Monitor performance

The Control Center contains a Dashboard that displays the overall system status. It provides statistics about the types of threats that inbound and outbound messages pose to your system. Statistics include data about the messages that are addressed to invalid recipients or that come from the addresses that have bad reputations. They also include the number of messages that have triggered virus, spam, and content filtering policies.

See About monitoring the status of your product.

Symantec Brightmail Gateway includes over 50 reports that provide statistics on content filtering, email messages, instant messages, IP connections, spam, and viruses from all Scanners. You can create reports when you need them or configure them to be emailed daily, weekly, or monthly.

See About working with reports.

Obtain definition updates

You can use either of the following methods to obtain virus definition updates:

• LiveUpdate

  You can use LiveUpdate to automatically update your protection. When LiveUpdate runs, it downloads and installs any available definitions.

• Rapid Response

  You can use Rapid Response when you need quick responses to emerging threats. Rapid Response definitions are most useful for a perimeter defense to mitigate quickly spreading threats. Rapid Response is an alternative to LiveUpdate.

See About updating virus definitions.

Obtain notifications about outbreaks, system issues, and policy violations

You can configure Symantec Brightmail Gateway to automatically send alerts and notifications about a wide variety of events.

These events include the following:

• Policy violations

• Virus outbreaks

• System and user preferences replication errors and status

• Spam and virus quarantine information

• License expiration and update availability

• Scheduled tasks failures

See Types of alerts.

Manage your appliance

Symantec Brightmail Gateway provides the features that help you do the following tasks:

• Monitor devices.

  See Monitoring devices through SNMP.

• Configure and manage Scanners.

  See About Scanner email settings.

• Manage system software.

  See Updating your software.

Use the command line to configure Symantec Brightmail Gateway

Each appliance has a set of commands you can use to configure, optimize, and administer your system. Access these commands by logging into the system either through SSH or by the VGA or serial connections on the appliance.