Email Policy Controls

The Email Policy functionality is a licensed component for all current NetPilot units. It provides the Administrator with great flexibility to control emails in ways he defines, depending on attributes of the email including:

- The header of the email
- The recipient
- The sender
- The subject
- The email size
- The anti virus scanning conducted
- The anti spam checking conducted
- The body of the email
- Email content - specific text or patterns

So what are the types of things that can be done with this flexible Email Policy control mechanism?

Add a specialised email footer depending on sender/recipient
As standard NetPilot can add footers for everyone - but you may want tailored footers for say your sales department giving latest offers !
Quarantine any email with an attachment
Some companies don't like the concept of attachment coming in or going out of their organisation without review - The administrator can intercept and authorise delivery.
Quarantine or just delete any incoming HTML mail!
Should you be using HTML mail? Well for one company they took the view that if anyone wants to email them - the email had better be in plain text - because their policy is to instantly delete HTML mails on the basis that they are spam at worst or marketing at best !
Quarantine or delete emails over a certain size
Sending an email out with a very large attachment may have seemed like a good idea to one user who gives no regard to what it does to his colleagues' network response. Quarantining the email for overnight transmission is now possible.
Create "out of office" auto responder messages with additional actions
A simple responder message can be easily configured - but also perhaps you would like to forward emails from just key customers or the boss to an 'out of office' mailbox, and optionally keep or delete email destined for the normal mailbox.
Block or particular domains or users sending email
Plagued by emails from certain sources? Blacklist them so they don't get through to all or just certain of your users.
Be absolutely assured you get email from certain domains or users
Worried that that key customers' email might be trapped as Spam because they will insist on using HTML and other Spam like characteristics. Whitelist the domains of your customers and your own staff - so you know the important people get through!
Forward email defined by domain (or sub-domain), or sender/recipient to a particular back end email server
You are a bigger organisation scanning incoming mail centrally, but want emails sorted to be onward routed to particular Exchange servers - all possible!
Block outgoing external emails from certain users - but allow internal mail
You may want some users to be able to only email their internal colleagues and no one externally. You may want to trust some other users a little further so they can send external emails but you want a copy of everything they send and receive, and finally you also want other users who are completely unrestricted and unmonitored. All possible!
Take copies of all emails coming from external addresses - but ignore all internal office messages
Some organisations want or have to backup all communications with external clients, but want to avoid backing up internal email chatter.

The Email Policy system can also work in conjunction with other UTM services which deal with email - in particular Anti-Virus Scanning and Anti-Spam. When either of these two services discovers an incoming (or outgoing) email which is deemed to be infected with a virus or is spam, they can quarantine the email, which is where the Email Policy system can take over. Additional rules and controls used by the Administrator can then be initiated. The Email Policy can also be actively employed as a second tier of checks. For example after (or even before) an incoming mail has been checked for the usual spam characteristics you could to decide that any email coming from a known source - say your customers - would always be treated as ham (good) messages, regardless of the content. In this fashion you are creating what is know as a whitelist. The exact opposite could also be set up, say any emails coming to your staff from your competitors could always be deleted (blacklisted) regardless of the content being deemed spam or whether it caries a virus or not !

In order to provide a 'totally flexible' mechanism for the administrator to add special rules appropriate to his site, user community and overall email environment,we have created what is know as a "Policy Tree". This is radically different to anything else seen before on the Admin control interface and at first sight looks a bit daunting. However if you can follow a flow chart - you can follow a Policy Tree and alter it for your applications.