What Is Fortinet's FortiGuard Antispam Service?
The FortiGuard Antispam Subscription Service on FortiGate or FortiMail systems dramatically reduces the amount of spam messages that corporate email servers process. The FortiGuard Antispam Service uses an IP address black list compiled from email captured by spam probes located around the world and sophisticated spam filtering tools. Spam probes are decoy email addresses purposely configured to attract spam and identify known spam sources to create the antispam IP address list. The FortiGuard Antispam Service is automated by Fortinet to provide constant monitoring and dynamic updates.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Dual Pass Detection Technology:  Significantly reduces the volume of spam email at the perimeter before it enters the corporate network, significantly reducing email attacks and infections.
• Customizable Policies:   Extreme flexibility with ability to set antispam filtering policies for each domain, group of users and users.
• Device-based Licensing:  No per-user licensing costs results in significantly lower operational and capital cost when compared to other similar RBL type services.
• Simple Setup:   Once enabled, FortiGuard Antispam Service is fully automatic and require no additional administration overhead.
• Flexible Deployment:   FortiGuard Antispam Service is supported on FortiGate, FortiClient and FortiMail systems.

Why Choose the FortiGuard Antispam Service?
Fortinet takes a comprehensive and multi-layer approach and uses a number of filtering techniques to detect and filter spam.

1. Global filters. Through the FortiGuard distribution network, FortiGuard Antispam service provides two databases, namely FortiIP and FortiSig, as global filters. FortiIP is a sender IP reputation database while FortiSig is a spam signature database. These global filters are constantly updated and enable our FortiGate, FortiClient and FortiMail products to detect and block the most prevailing spam.
2. Customized filters. Various customized spam filters are provided to compliment the Fortinet's Antispam solution on the service delivery units: FortiGate, FortiClient and FortiMail. These customized filters range from banned words filters, local white and black lists of sender email address, heuristic rules, to highly sophisticated techniques such as Bayesian training in FortiMail. See the documentation of respective products for more information.
3. Dedicated service team. A dedicated team of engineers and analysts in the Foritnet Threat Research Team monitors the global spam activities and analyze latest spam techniques to provide our customer with the most comprehensive protection against spams.

Configuration Flexibility: Real-Time Blackhole List (RBL) Support Open Relay Database Server (ORDB) Support Black/White List Support Keyword/Phrase Blocking IP Address Blacklist/Exempt List DNS Lookup Support Email Address Lookup Support MIME Header Checking Image Spam Protection

How Does Fortinet antispam Solution Work?
Fortinet Antispam solution consists of FortiGate, FortiMail, and FortiClient as the service delivery unit, combined with FortiGuard Antispam service to provide constant signature updates. FortiGuard Antispam provides global filters, while the service delivery units complete the antispam solution with local filters.

1. FortiGate obtains the SMTP mail server source address and email header, subject, and body of the email for common spam content.
2. FortiGuard Antispam checks the information against the antispam IP address list.
3. If the source address matches the list of known spammers, FortiGuard-Antispam tags the email or terminates the session according to the configuration in the firewall protection profile.
4. If FortiGuard Antispam does not find a match, the email is allowed.
5. The mail server sends the email to the recipient.