avast! 4 SMTP Server Edition

The SMTP Server Edition works as a plug-in to the Microsoft SMTP Service (part of the IIS). It can be deployed on a machine that acts as a universal gateway (or border server) for scanning purposes only - no matter which mail server you actually use.

avast! SMTP Server Edition works as a plug-in to the Microsoft SMTP Service (part of the IIS). It can be deployed on a machine that acts as a universal gateway (or border server) for scanning purposes only - no matter which mail server you actually use.

The product works as a plug-in for avast! Server Edition. Therefore, it uses the same high-performance, award-winning, ICSA-certified engine as the Server Editon itself, providing you with maximal protection.

This product is also internally used by a related product, avast! Exchange Server Edition. That is, avast! SMTP Server Edition is part of avast! Exchange Server Edition used to scan all SMTP traffic on Exchange servers.

Real-time SMTP Scanning

The primary goal of avast! SMTP Server Edition is to effectively filter all SMTP traffic. It has been shown many times in the past that SMTP is the absolute no. 1 source of infection so an antivirus solution deployed on SMTP servers (or SMTP gateways) is a bare necessity. By keeping the code as small as possible, our solution features outstanding performance and robustness combined with very little overhead and small memory footprint.

Integration with the IIS

Thanks to a tight integration with the Windows SMTP Service (part of the Windows Internet Information Services - IIS), avast! is able to detect and remove viruses from both inbound and outbound messages, always before they reach their recipients. This is done by connecting to the SMTP Service and synchronously screening all messages before they're allowed to proceed to the delivery queue. Thus it is guaranteed that no message will slip through untested.

Intelligent Actions

avast! SMTP Server Edition offers a wide variety of automatic actions that can take place whenever a virus is found. Seperate rules can be specified for inbound and outbound traffic, and also for untestable (e.g. encrypted) messages. avast! is also able to change the message body/headers by adding information about the infection status of the message (this feature can be activated for both infected and clean messages).

Attachment Blocking

avast!, SMTP Server Edition also contains a simple attachment blocker. You can specify file name masks (such as *.pif or Love*.vbs) of attachments that will be stripped from all inbound and outbound messages. This is a very simple yet extremely powerful weapon to effectively fight against a number of both known and yet-uknown malware.

Alerting & logging

As with any server-side software, it is very important to provide effective means of monitoring. For these purposes, avast! offers a wide range of possibilities. These include thorough notification capabilities via e-mail and avast's built-in Notification Manager (that supports a number of other transport protocols), rich logging features, and performance counters.

The e-mail notifications are "intelligent" by means of predefined limits (to avoid flooding of the server with avast's own messages) and also in the fact that they are only being sent to respective message senders if these are really the originators of the infected mail (i.e. if the From: fields of the message have not been forged).

Automatic updates

The SMTP Server Edition uses the identical updating modules as avast! Server Edition itself, resulting in unparalled speed and size of updates. The updates can be either installed automatically by the updater, or manually. It is also possible to set the system up so that the updater first asks the administrator prior to installing any updates.

The Exchange module also recognizes the avast! PUSH iAVS messages. Therefore, the avast's unique PUSH iAVS feature is fully compatible with the SMTP Server Edition, with no additional modifications of settings required.