• SonicOS 7.1
• About SonicOS
  • Working with SonicOS
  • SonicOS Workflow
  • How to Use the SonicOS Administration Guides
  • Guide Conventions
• Anti-Spam
  • About Anti-Spam
    • What is Anti-Spam?
    • Benefits
  • How Does the Anti-Spam Service Work?
    • GRID Network
      • Benefits
      • GRID Connection Management with Sender IP Reputation and Connection Management Precedence Order
    • Address and Service Objects
      • Objects Created When the Anti-Spam Service is Enabled
  • Purchasing an Anti-Spam License
• Status
• Settings
  • Activating Anti-Spam
  • Installing the Junk Store
  • Configuring Email Threat Categories
  • Configuring Access Lists
    • Configuring User-defined Access Lists
    • Adding a Host to the Access Lists
  • Configuring Advanced Settings
• Relay Domains
  • About Open Relay
  • Listing Allowed Relay Domains
• Junk Box Messages
  • Information Displayed in the Junk Box Messages Table
  • Managing Junk Box Messages
• Junk Box Settings
• Junk Box Summary
  • Managing the Junk Box Summary
• User View Setup
  • Configuring User View Setup
• Address Books
  • About the Tabs
    • Allowed Lists
    • Blocked Lists
  • Adding Items to the Allowed or Blocked List
  • Deleting Items from the Allowed or Blocked List
  • Importing Address Book Entries
  • Exporting Address Book Entries
  • Searching the Allowed and Blocked Lists
• Manage Users
  • Updating the User Table
  • Enabling Non-LDAP User Authentication
  • Viewing Users
    • Selecting the Type of User to View
    • Selecting a Server’s Users to View
    • Finding a User
  • Adding Users
    • Adding Users Manually to the User Table
    • Importing Users to the User Table
  • Signing In as a User
• LDAP Configuration
  • Adding an LDAP Server
    • Configuring LDAP Queries
    • Adding LDAP Mappings
  • Editing an LDAP Server Configuration
  • Deleting an LDAP Server
• Advanced
  • Downloading System/Log Files
  • Selecting Log Settings
• Downloads
• SonicWall Support
  • About This Document

What is Anti-Spam?

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

In a typical Anti-Spam configuration, you choose to add Anti-Spam capabilities by selecting it in the SonicOS interface and licensing it. The firewall then uses the same advanced spam-filtering technology as the SonicWall Email Security products to reduce the amount of junk email delivered to users.

There are two primary ways inbound messages are analyzed by the Anti-Spam feature:

• Advanced IP Reputation Management
• 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 firewall, 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.

The Anti-Spam service determines that an email fits only one of the following threats: Spam, Likely Spam, Phishing, Likely Phishing, Virus, or Likely Virus. It uses the following precedence order when evaluating threats in email messages:

Phishing Likely Phishing

Virus Likely Virus

Spam Likely Spam

For example, if a message is both a virus and spam, the message is categorized as a virus as virus is higher in precedence than spam.

If the Anti-Spam service determines that the message is not any of the above threats, it is judged as good email and is delivered to the destination server.