The Anti-Spam feature provides a quick, efficient, and effective way to add anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-virus capabilities to your existing SonicWall network security appliance.

In a typical configuration of Anti-Spam, the administrator chooses to add Anti-Spam capabilities by selecting it in the SonicOS interface and licensing it. The SonicWall network security appliance then uses the same advanced spam-filtering technology as the SonicWall Email Security products to reduce the amount of junk email the organization delivers to users.

There are two primary ways inbound messages are analyzed by the Anti-Spam feature - Advanced IP Reputation Management and Cloud-based Advanced Content Management. IP Address Reputation uses the GRID Network to identify the IP addresses of known spammers, and reject any mail from those senders without even allowing a connection. GRID Network Sender IP Reputation Management checks the IP address of incoming connecting requests against a series of lists and statistics to ensure that the connection has a probability of delivering valuable email. The lists are compiled using the collaborative intelligence of the SonicWall GRID Network. Known spammers are prevented from connecting to the SonicWall network security appliance, and their junk email payloads never consume system resources on the targeted systems.

Email that does not come from known spammers is analyzed based on “GRIDprints” generated by SonicWall’s research laboratories and are based on data from millions of business endpoints, hundreds of millions of messages, and billions of reputation votes from the users of the GRID Network. Our Grid Network uses data from multiple SonicWall solutions to create a collaborative intelligence network that defends against the worldwide threat landscape. GRIDprints uniquely identify messages without exposing data contained in the email message.