Mailborder Systems

Mailborder shields your organization from dangerous and unwanted email by acting as a virtual barrier between your email servers and the Internet. This is done without any hardware or software and requires minimal configuration changes by you.

Mailborder does this by focusing on what should be your first email standard: keep spam and viruses off your network, and not catch them once they hit your email server. When we say keep this bad email off your network, we mean exactly that. Spam, viruses, and malicious content never get delivered to your network. This not only greatly reduces your level of risk, but also bandwidth and resources used at your organization.

Click here to see a flash presentation of how Mailborder works.

Before we get too technical, here is a basic example. Imagine that you are a movie star (put on your sunglasses) and that you have an assistant for fan mail. If anyone wants to talk send you mail, it has to be relayed through your assistant first. Your assistant then determines what’s important and valid based on the criteria you have previously issued. After your assistant filters out all of the static, only the important items are given to you. This is in effect the same exact thing Mailborder will do for your organization’s email. You tell it what to let through and Mailborder handles the rest. If something gets stopped that you actually wanted to get through, you can release it from your Mailborder Control Panel.

To make Mailborder filter your email, a simple change to your DNS records is made after your setup your account. This is done by you or your staff, so total control over your email always remains with you and not Mailborder. Mailborder just makes controlling what gets delivered and what doesn’t amazingly effective and easy to do.

Normally, your organizational email server is listed as the primary MX record for your organization. To utilize Mailborder’s technology you simply change that value to point at Mailborder’s email servers, and we give you three of them for unmatched redundancy. Of course we recommend that your email server remain listed in your MX records, but it will be last in the priority. For example, a query against the example.com domain protected by Mailborder would look like this:

The answer section above tells the rest of the world that your first three email servers (priority 5, 10, 15) are the Mailborder servers. The last email server (priority 20) is your current email server. So when an email is sent to example.com, the first server that will be tried is mgw-003, then mgw-001, and so on. After your inbound email has been processed according to your specifications, only the clean mail is delivered to your email server at myserver.example.com by the Mailborder servers.

Locking Down Your Email
Once you've confirmed your settings for Mailborder are working to your specifications, we recommend restricting your inbound SMTP traffic to the Mailborder servers. This action prevents rogue mail servers from connecting directly to your organizational servers and sending spam. Also, we recommend that you continue to list your own internal servers as the last server as in the example above. This lets other email servers on the Internet know that your internal email servers that deliver outbound email are authorized email servers for your domain. It also wouldn't hurt to ensure that you create SPF records for your domain if you have not already done so.