Email Protection Administrator Guide
November 2012
Proprietary: Not for use or disclosure outside McAfee without written permission
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It is also highly recommended that you block the acceptance of email traffic from any
source other than Email Protection into your inbound servers to help prevent the
possibilities of hackers directly connecting your servers.
Question: Why am I redirecting the MX Record and how does my email
get back to me?
Answer:
The MX Record is the method of telling all the other email servers on the
Internet who you are (your domain names) and where you are (your inbound server
addresses). When any email is sent, the sending email server looks at the MX Record to
verify the email server to which the email should be delivered.
By redirecting your MX Record to point to the server where Email Protection is installed,
you are sending your email to Email Protection. Email Protection captures your domain’s
email traffic by acting as the email server for the Domain, routing the traffic through
Email Protection filters, and then delivering the acceptable emails to your email servers.
You configure your email servers in the
Inbound Servers Setup
window.
In a similar way, if you have enabled outbound email filtering, you would configure your
sending email server to send your email to Email Protection. Email Protection filters your
email and then sends it to the Internet cloud.
One advantage of redirecting your MX Record is that the addresses of your email servers
are now no longer published, which helps to protect your email servers from direct email
attacks and bad email.
Question: My server went down for a short period of time – what
happened to our company’s emails?
Answer:
Email Protection attempts to connect to all the servers configured for your
domain in the
Inbound Servers Setup
window in the order designated in the
Preference
column, from the lowest number to the highest number. It then determines whether you
have Fail Safe enabled for your email and if it is, it will start spooling and unspooling the
email appropriately.
If Fail Safe is not enabled and if Email Protection cannot establish a connection with any
of your email server(s), it will deliver a “temporary failure” message to the sending email
server. When this occurs, the sending email server will usually attempt to redeliver the
email again.
Most email servers are set to keep trying to deliver the email for an extended period of
time before they finally stop and permanently fail the email. Email Protection cannot
control the length of time or the frequency at which the sender’s email server will continue
to attempt deliver these emails. However, the Fail Safe feature can store emails in the
event that Email Protection cannot deliver emails due to an email server malfunction.
Contact your sales representative for more information about Fail Safe.
Question: How does Email Protection affect my MTA?
Answer:
Email Protection architecture naturally provides high-level redundancy and
disaster recovery by leveraging a secondary MX record set to your internal mail servers.
The service is currently configured to deliver your inbound email traffic to the Message
