VIPRE Endpoint Security Cloud's Email Protection safeguards your endpoint devices by keeping unwanted risks out of user inboxes. This article explains the different policy options available and helps you determine the best choices for your endpoints.

How Email Protection works

Email Protection puts you in control without requiring that you constantly review email communications for each device. VIPRE monitors endpoints for you, enabling greater protection for at-risk devices, disable protection for devices that don’t use supported email clients, and manage anti-phishing at a policy level — by department, team or level of employee.

The individual components of Email Protection are

• Email Protection - Scans message code and attachments
• Anti-Phishing - Checks all linked content against known phishing websites and domains
• Outlook - A plug-in installed on the agent that provides extra protection for users of the Outlook client
• Other Clients - Looks for malicious activity on inbound and outbound ports
• Interaction - If you trust your end user, you may allow them to turn Email Protection scanning on or off at will

All Email Protection options are off by default, so you must enable them in your policies as desired.

Note: These email protection options are not available in policies for Mac agents.

Stop spam with VIPRE Email Security

VIPRE Cloud does not include an anti-spam component. Our VIPRE Email Security product can stop spam emails from reaching your end users, protecting you before one of your users even has a chance to accidentally click on something. More information is available on our VIPRE products page.

Configuring email protection options

For each policy, you can enable or disable email scanning and anti-phishing, enable or disable Outlook protection, configure inbound and outbound ports for non-SSL email clients, and toggle user interaction on or off.

The Enable Email Protection... toggle also affects Anti-Phishing. In order to turn on Anti-Phishing, Email Protection itself must be enabled (otherwise VIPRE can't scan emails to check for phishing links).

Enable Email Protection

In each policy, enable Email Protection to have VIPRE scan all messages flowing in or out of devices. Email Protection deciphers the email message, looks at the code, and checks all attachments. 

Enabling this option ensures every email message is checked for malware and other risks. This is important because even users who understand the risks associated with email don’t always act with security at the forefront of their minds. Email recipients may be too busy to notice that an attachment looks suspicious, and even the most savvy users probably won’t catch every issue, as hackers are becoming increasingly adept at making malicious emails look legitimate.

By setting VIPRE to scan every email, you reduce the chances of a successful email campaign against your business. If VIPRE finds an infected attachment, it’s stripped from the email. A plain text file replaces the infected attachment to let the user know the attachment was removed and quarantined.

When not to enable Email Protection

• Server-based policies - You shouldn’t enable Email Protection for agents running on an Microsoft Exchange server, or any server relaying email traffic, as this will halt communication. This protection is designed to be used with endpoints that use a supported email client.

How to allow users to disable Email Protection

This function is controlled in the Interaction section at the bottom of the page.

Depending on your end-user level, you can choose per policy how much control over Email Protection you want to give to your end user. When Allow user to enable/disable Email Protection is on, users can turn Email Protection on or off.

For example, you might allow Admin-level employees to manage their own Email Protection but enforce it for other employees.

When not to enable Email Protection

• Server-based policies - You shouldn’t enable Email Protection for agents running on a Microsoft Exchange server, or any server relaying email traffic, as this will halt communication. This protection is designed to be used with endpoints that use a supported email client.

How to allow users to disable Email Protection

This function is controlled in the Interaction section at the bottom of the page.

Depending on your end-user level, you can choose per policy how much control over Email Protection you want to give to your end user. When Allow user to enable/disable Email Protection is on, users can turn Email Protection on or off.

For example, you might allow Admin-level employees to manage their own Email Protection but enforce it for other employees.

Enabling user interaction on the device agent allows capable end users to toggle Email Protection on or off.

Enable Anti-Phishing

With Anti-Phishing enabled, VIPRE evaluates emails for possible phishing scams by comparing links to known phishing data. If phishing is suspected, the known bad links are stripped from the email message to remove any chance that a user might click on them.

Examples of the types of phishing links VIPRE removes include:

• False account links, which try to trick users into revealing log-in credentials or other sensitive information
• Links that download malware
• URLs associated with malicious websites

Enable additional client and port protection

You can also enable protection for Outlook and other email clients so VIPRE can better integrate with your individual needs. Note that TLS/SSL is not supported when enabling other email clients.

Supported clients include:

• Outlook 2003+
• SMTP/POP3 (such as Thunderbird, Eudora, IncrediMail and others)

Although web-based email (such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) is not supported by VIPRE Endpoint's Email Protection functionality, any bad links clicked on or infected items downloaded should still be picked up by VIPRE's Advanced Active Protection. Also, our VIPRE Email Security - Cloud Edition product can protect your email from threats, even for webmail-based services.

Why should you enable Outlook or client protection?

Client protection provides an extra layer of security for endpoint devices running Outlook, or any email client utilizing non-SSL POP mail access. VIPRE's Outlook protection uses Microsoft plug-in technology, and includes scanning of encrypted messages and mail items that pass through your Exchange server.

Because TLS/SSL encryption is not supported, you should ensure that it is not a requirement for individual email users or teams on the policy, especially if there are any processes that involve payment arrangements or information in email. TLS/SSL encryption may also be required for certain emails in highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance.

How to enable Outlook client protection

To Enable Outlook protection, select Enable protection for Outlook. This enables the client-side plugin on Outlook 2003 and later. You may need to restart Outlook on the endpoint device before changes take effect.

How to enable protection for other clients

Non-Outlook email clients are protected on a network port-scanning level. There is no local client plugin for these applications.

The default email client ports are set at 110 for inbound (POP3) and 25 for outbound (SMTP).

To enable protection on non-SSL clients, such as Thunderbird, select Enable protection for other email clients. Then, set the appropriate port values for inbound (POP3) and outbound (SMTP) traffic. Check your device's email client settings to confirm the correct values.

Non-Outlook clients are protected on a POP and SMTP level (via port scanning).