SPAMfighter Exchange Module works by integrating itself into Microsoft Exchange - which in turn will notify SPAMfighter Exchange Module when a new email is about to be delivered to a user.

When a new email arrives, SPAMfighter will scan the email and determine if the email is a spam email or a legitimate email. If the email is determined to be spam, SPAMfighter will mark the email as such - and based on the configuration SPAMfighter will either:

The way SPAMfighter determines if an email is spam or legitimate is by running the email through a number of filters. The most important filter is the Community Filter which will generate a unique signature of the email and ask the global SPAMfighter Classification Network if this email is a known spam email or not. All of this takes only milliseconds and users will not notice anything - except the massive decrease of spam received.

The SPAMfighter Classification Network is a global network of servers to which the million of users in the SPAMfighter Community reports spam to. This means, to fully utilize the power of SPAMfighter, SPAMfighter needs to have access to the Internet.

As the communication between SPAMfighter Exchange Module and the SPAMfighter servers is fully connection oriented and no compromising information is exchanged, security is normally not compromised in any way. If a firewall has been installed, it may or may not be necessary to configure this to let SPAMfighter Exchange Module communicate with the SPAMfighter Classification Network.

SPAMfighter will automatically test whether or not this will be necessary during the installation - and you can read more about how to configure a firewall in the Troubleshooting section.