SAFENTRIX Frequently Asked Questions (Outbound)
| Introduction | Implementation | Features | Technical(Control Panel) | Technical(Email Related) | Pricing | Referral |
Last Updated on January 7, 2010
Features- How effective is SAFENTRIX?
- How does SAFENTRIX save bandwidth?
- What does zero hour Virus protection mean?
- Is SAFENTRIX secure?
- How does SAFENTRIX identify SPAM?
- How is SAFENTRIX different? (or) What is unique about SAFENTRIX?
- How reliable is SAFENTRIX?
- Why is CAPTCHA used is SAFENTRIX?
- How is SAFENTRIX HIPAA/GLB Compliant?
- What support is available for SAFENTRIX?
- How do we view the Quarantine in SAFENTRIX?
- Is SAFENTRIX compatible with my email server?
- How many email addresses does SAFENTRIX support per domain?
- Is there any limit on the amount of emails / bandwidth, our organization can use?
- Are there any other usage policies in SAFENTRIX?
- Is it possible to use SAFENTRIX for sub-domains?
- What kind of advertisements get added in emails received by SAFENTRIX Standard Edition users?
1. How effective is SAFENTRIX?
SAFENTRIX guarantees 100% Virus protection (from existing viruses) and 99%+ SPAM effectiveness. For new viruses, SAFENTRIX will block it within 1 hour of the first sample hitting our servers.
99% SPAM effectiveness means that for every 1000 emails an organization receives, less than ten will be SPAM.
2. How does SAFENTRIX save bandwidth?SAFENTRIX never lets SPAM/Virus emails reach your email server.
Let us say that your SPAM/Virus traffic is about 30-40% of overall traffic.
With SAFENTRIX, the traffic does not even reach your premise and you save 30-40% on Bandwidth costs.
3. What does zero hour Virus protection mean?SAFENTRIX assures 100% protection against existing Viruses. Zero hour Virus protection means that SAFENTRIX will start blocking an Unknown Virus within 1 hour of receipt of first such email in SAFENTRIX Servers.
4. Is SAFENTRIX secure?Yes.
We realize the importance of your organization emails and therefore have done the utmost to Secure the use of SAFENTRIX.
SAFENTRIX broadly consists of two facilities:
- Control Panel and associated facilities.
- The actual Email infrastructure.
Below, find details of our security to each of these facilities:
- Control Panel and associated facilities:
- Control panel access is strictly through SSL.
- The SSL is High Grade encryption (AES 256 bit) and the Digital Certificate is from Equifax Secure, Inc.
- Every account (by default) is protected by IP Checks.
- IP Check means that, if your account is accessed from a new place, an email is sent to the Account email address. The access is allowed only if you confirm.
- If anybody tries to break in to your account using brute force password guessing, you are sent a warning email. This will help you to take counter measures (like changing the account password).
- The Control panel application undergoes Application penetration testing periodically and vulnerabilities (if any found) are fixed.
- To prevent automated application hacking, every key feature of SAFENTRIX requires CAPTCHA authentication.
- Email architecture:
- All servers covered under email architecture are protected by Network and Host based Firewalls. Only traffic absolutely required is allowed into the architecture and that too only from places they are likely to originate from.
- All email servers support TLS. This means that if the sender/recipient email servers support TLS, the whole chain of email delivery is encrypted. This ensures email security during transit.
- The software building blocks for the architecture are selected for their security features as well. In fact, the main building block for the Internet exposed front line servers is "Postfix", one of the most secure email servers available.
SAFENTRIX uses multiple layers of tests to identify SPAM. A brief description of each is given below:
- IP Blacklisting: SAFENTRIX uses IP blacklists and cuts off blacklisted email servers at the connection level itself.
- HELO Checking: SAFENTRIX checks for Valid HELO format and cuts off servers that do not conform at connection level.
- Sender Domain/address checking. While sender domain has to exist for SAFENTRIX to receive emails, limited sender address checking is also done to minimize sender ID spoofing.
- Recipient address checking.
- Greylisting: SAFENTRIX uses selective Greylisting to thwart email blasts from Desktops/Zombie machines. Emails from normal servers are never delayed due to this.
- Proprietary Content checking: SAFENTRIX analyzes contents of emails to check if they are SPAM.
6. How is SAFENTRIX different?
(or)
What is unique about SAFENTRIX?
Some of SAFENTRIX unique features are given below:
- Easy to maintain and install. There is no quarantine to manage daily.
- SAFENTRIX has 7 different layers of SPAM protection.
- SAFENTRIX Standard Edition is fully free (supported by third party advertisements).
- SAFENTRIX Enterprise Edition is INR 17/- (US$ 0.43) per user per month, the most cost effective of all services.
- No software or Hardware to install and can be activated in less than 3 hours.
7. How reliable is SAFENTRIX?
(or)
What uptime is guaranteed by SAFENTRIX?
SAFENTRIX architecture is redundant and scalable. The architecture is such a way that
- There are multiple servers for a single task (be it backend or frontend). This ensures that there is no single point of failure. Some critical storage/servers have geographical redundancy and are distributed over multiple locations.
- The architecture uses cloud computing with the following advantages:
- If any of the existing servers gets into any issues (Hardware or otherwise), they can be replaced with a fully working replica in 10 minutes or less.
- If the load becomes high and new servers are required, they can be instantiated in 10 minutes or less.
Given the above, SAFENTRIX will always be available.
SAFENTRIX Enterprise Edition provides a SLA with following parameters:
- 100% Virus protection for existing Viruses.
- 99%+ SPAM protection.
- Zero hour protection for new Viruses.
- 99.9% Uptime
8. Why is CAPTCHA used is SAFENTRIX?
SAFENTRIX uses CAPTCHA extensively for security purposes. CAPTCHA thwarts many kinds of automated attacks and this enhances the security of the system over all.
Using CAPTCHA also ensures that resources are utilized optimally, thus reducing overall cost of the service.
9. How is SAFENTRIX HIPAA/GLB Compliant?HIPAA/GLB are official business standards for certain industry verticals.
The standards have clauses which say communication should be secure when data is transmitted.
SAFENTRIX complies with these clauses using TLS and Network/Host based Firewalls.
10. What support is available for SAFENTRIX?SAFENTRIX has many channels for support at http://www.safentrix.com/discussion.html. They are listed below:
- User/Administrator Manuals: Guides for Installation as well as maintenance for SAFENTRIX is available in the support page.
- Mailing List: You can post to SAFENTRIX Support mailing list (support@list.safentrix.com) for any help you may require. Since only members can post to this list, please subscribe (by sending an email to support-subscribe@list.safentrix.com) prior to making any posting.
- Dr. SAFENTRIX: Dr. SAFENTRIX is an automated tool that will examine your setup and give suggestions on what is wrong and how it can be fixed. Dr. SAFENTRIX can be accessed at http://www.safentrix.com/drsafentrix.
- Implementation Partners: A list of SAFENTRIX implementation partners is available at http://www.safentrix.com/partner. These are local partners who will setup SAFENTRIX for your domain for a fee.
- Live Chat Support: During normal business hours, you can chat with our technical support specialists. They will provide help on
+ Questions on SAFENTRIX
+ Implementation of SAFENTRIX
11. How do we view the Quarantine in SAFENTRIX?
You cannot, because SAFENTRIX does not have the concept of Quarantine. SPAM/Virus emails are blocked at SMTP level itself and only genuine emails are transferred onto client.
This also ensures that SAFENTRIX is easy to maintain because there is no need to inspect Quarantine frequently.
A small organization with about 100 users can get about 2000 emails in SPAM in a day and if someone has to go through these emails daily to check, there is no point in even having a SPAM solution!
12. Is SAFENTRIX compatible with my email server?SAFENTRIX works at domain level and can forward emails to any server that understands SMTP.
This means that SAFENTRIX is compatible with all email servers including (but not limited to)
- Postfix
- Qmail
- Sendmail
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- Novell Groupwise
- Lotus SMTP Server
13. How many email addresses does SAFENTRIX support per domain?
SAFENTRIX has a limit of 20,000 email addresses per domain. If your organization has more email addresses than this, you may either
- Split the domain into sub-domains and have 20,000 users in each sub-domain (or)
- Send us a special request and we will work out a solution for you.
14. Is there any limit on the amount of emails / bandwidth, our organization can use?
No.
15. Are there any other usage policies in SAFENTRIX?SAFENTRIX tries to minimize the resources utilized so that the cost of services can be kept low. To this effect, SAFENTRIX has some usage policies as given below:
- If you do not have any domains in your account and your account has not been logged into for two months, a warning will be sent and the account deleted.
- SAFENTRIX is a pass through server and all emails are finally delivered to your Delivery MX Servers.
- If any of your Delivery MX server refuses to accept email for a SAFENTRIX user, that user will be disabled in SAFENTRIX and a warning email sent to you.
In this case, you should fix the problem in your Delivery MX Server(s) and re-enable the user using SAFENTRIX Control panel. - If your Delivery MX server refuses to accept email for a continuous amount of time, due to
+ Connectivity issues (or)
+ Other issues
SAFENTRIX will send a warning email alerting you towards this issue and ask you to rectify this problem. - If the above happens repeatedly even after warnings, SAFENTRIX will disable your domain and send you an email.
In this case, you should fix the problem in your Delivery MX Server(s) and re-enable the domain using SAFENTRIX control panel.
16. Is it possible to use SAFENTRIX for sub-domains?
Yes. Add them like a normal domain to your SAFENTRIX account.
17. What kind of advertisements get added in emails received by SAFENTRIX Standard Edition users?- The advertisement that gets added is a one line text advertisement with another line giving a link.
- A sample is given below:
-----
STOP SPAM, STOP Virus and SAVE Bandwidth.
See http://www.safentrix.com for details.
-----
- Typical advertisements include Industrial/ Commercial service/product advertisements.
- The advertisements are manually approved by SAFENTRIX Content checkers to ensure that they are family and child safe.
- For purpose of standards, we use tools from ICRA (devised by "Family Online Safety Institute", http://www.fosi.org).