It was sometime around December of 2000 when TRI decided to start hosting email. We took a low-end computer, installed Red Hat Linux 7.0 and got Sendmail running. With little Unix/Linux experience, we had some trouble initially, but those days are far-gone and we have been running smoothly for over a year.

At first we only were interested in hosting our own email but after a while we decided to offer the service to our clients. TRI now hosts a dozen domains and processes thousands of emails daily.  With the increase in users and virus threats these days we decided it was time to invest in Virus Protection for our email server. 

The choice on which virus software package to use was tough. All of our systems as well as our clients use either Novell or Microsoft based Operating Systems. Whether it is Windows95, 98 or Windows 2000 or a Novell server, we knew what software was available and which were the best to use. This was not the case with Linux.

After doing some research on the Internet, we found a few possible Linux Anti-Virus options. After testing a couple of packages and being totally disappointed we almost wanted to forget about trying to find something that would work for Linux.

Then we came across Trend Micro’s Interscan VirusWall, a product that works with Linux and Sendmail and it has a nice web interface. We downloaded and installed the trial version. Results were instantaneous. The software was catching many viruses a day. The install date of this product couldn’t have come at a better time.  It was on April 24th, 2002 when we installed Trend Micro Interscan VirusWall, just one week after the nasty W32.Klez.H@mm was discovered. This virus hit one of our clients April 18th. we spent several hours on and off-site repairing the infected computers.

Since April 24th the server has caught and deleted 325 viruses, 80% of which are Klez or Klez variants.

Another very interesting benefit in our decision is another product that is a plug-in for Interscan VirusWall called eManager.

It is an anti-Spam/content filter for email. Based on policies you can setup, the email is either quarantined or deleted on the spot.  We created some policies based on Spam we had been receiving on a daily basis. To date more than 1,400 emails have been deleted using the custom Spam policies in place. This saves time and money for everyone.

On a closing note, if an client receives any viruses or thinks they are missing email, they should contact Joe Brochu at 978-422-7770 x303 or email jbrochu@trif.com.
Logs are kept for all virus and Spam deletions and are also checked periodically to make sure valid email is not being deleted.

Also if anyone is interested in how much Spam was sent to them and deleted by eManager we would be happy to give them a total count.