Mail Gateways 2.1

Question 1

Unsolicited Email

Answer 1

Can be stopped before it reaches users. Spam is filtered on site or in the cloud via email fitering.

Question 2

Email Filtering

Answer 2

Email gateways can examine email inbound and outbound. Emails can be blocked at the gateway or modified before the hit the inbox. Anti-virus is commonly paired with a gateway. Data Loss Prevention is also commonly paired at the gateway in order to protect confidential information in emails.

Question 3

Identifying Spam

Answer 3

Filtering spam has multiple solutions. You can create a whitelist to only allow trusted senders. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) standards checking; block anything that doesn’t follow RFC standards. rDNS - Block email where the sender domain doesn’t match the IP. Tarpitting - Intentionally slowing down the email server to dissuade spammers from wanting to send you stuff. Recipient filtering, block all non valid addresses.

Question 4

Email Encryption

Answer 4

Mail is easily intercepted and most email is not encrypted. Sensitive information must be encrypted. The challenge for email systems is that encryption is not easy and has a lot of hoops to jump through. The email gateway can check for encryption and based on pre-determined policy can force encryption on the email. In this case, the sender will be sent a text message w/ the encryption password so that that password can be given to the email recipient. Many email clients support encryption. The gateway can recognize if an email has already been encrypted.