Virtual Private Servers| Linux | Windows 2003

Spam, viruses and other undesirable eMail messages consume more than 85% of all SMTP traffic.  The constant flow of undesirable eMail traffic wastes valuable server resources, which is especially important in virtual environments.  The flow of abusive traffic decreases performance for authenticated mail users, quickly fills disk space and increases bandwidth usage.  It also wastes CPU resources because spam filtering engines are always running and must process every single message.  Bayesian filters alone can consume a tremendous amount of resources.  This reduces the servers ability to respond to other running applications that are frequent in virtual environments, such as Plesk, database servers, web servers and the email server itself.

CNS GateKeeper is a managed SMTP proxy to filter unwanted email traffic from the Internet to your virtual server.  Configured between the Internet and your mail server as a SMTP proxy, all spam and virus filtering is off-loaded from the VPS to the GateKeeper managed service.  This makes more virtual server resources available to applications because the server is not also working to keep out undesirable email traffic.  The performance impact can be substantial for VPS's with many email accounts.

Your eMail subscribers will enjoy a MS Outlook toolbar to report spam and adjust their white lists. Reports can also be filed by forwarding messages as attachments to respective eMail addresses.

This service is currently available to CNS virtual and dedicated server customers.  Gatekeeper will be available for in-house corporate mail servers in the near future.

We assign your GateKeeper subscription a public IP address to use as the MX record and change your servers SMTP primary port away from 25, so that outside mail servers can not connect.  Your authenticated users will continue to connect to your mail server as usual, using port 587, but unauthenticated Internet mail will be routed through the GateKeeper service and on to your SMTP server.  Your mail server is also configured to smart-host messages back out through the GateKeeper service so that GK can analyze your outgoing mail and update the spam and whitelist database.  Domains hosted on our DNS are  automatically added to the access list.  If your domain is not hosted on the CNS DNS then you will need to be sure and update us with any new domains so that your filter can be adjusted.  Very little maintenance is required after the initial setup.