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How can I block web based email

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by damonk

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How can I block web based email from being accessed from inside our network(I.E. Hotmail accounts). We spend a lot of money on firewalls, virus protection on email servers/file servers/desktops and even content filtering of email for porn and the like. In waltzes joe user on his hot mail account and pulls in porn or viruses that cause us to use support time in reacting to it. Blocking the individual domains on the firewall is too reactionary and maintenance intensive. Is there software out there that can block this or a firewall configuration that works well?

7 replies

by jschling

What type of virus protection, firewalls and email server are you using? Generically you can block emails to and from specific ports, like some of the web based clients. But, this sometimes is specific to the type of firewall you are using. Like for instance, Novell Bordermanager can help you do some good, being it is a router/filter based system. But, i think a lot of the web based email is using that standard port for html?

by damonk

We tried isolating the ports on the firewall but the email comes across on generic HTML ports. I was hoping someone knew of a specific characteristic the email had that we could filter on or some software that works off content analysis.

by zk

I'm not clear on what you mean by web based email.

How are your users accessing their hotmail?

Do they go to www.hotmail.com from their web browsers and log in for their email? If they are, you cannot block it without blocking the hotmail website. And I don't see any reason for going to www.hotmail.com other than checking email. There is no content there other than email. If you really want to be politically correct block the http://*hotmail*/cgi-bin/login. Only commercial high-end firewall can do this kind of detail filtering.

Now, another scenerio is they are using Outlook Express. In this case, even though they are using email the requests will still go to port 80 and check. Filter outgoing destination http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp on port 80.

Without the platform, version of your OS, filtering software and firewall, I don't know what else to suggest.

Hope that helps.

by techguy max

Besides hotmail, there are various free webmail providers. As far as I know there is no way to filter all of them unless you filter word "mail" for URLs and links (incl. text). This is a harsh measure but if you have no other choice go for it.
Or, you can alternatively filter all the popular email sites (http://www.hotmail.com/*, http://mail.yahoo.com/* etc...)

BTW WebSence has some good filtering options...

Take care...
...Max

by ed spencer

Depending on your organization you can either resort to a blocking/reporting mechanism like Little Brother to block them (it's actually easy with Little Brother) or if you're using CheckPoint Firewall-1 there are content vectoring add-ons that will check what they are pulling through for viruses and the like. If it's the actual content you want to prevent I would recommend Little Brother (or similar packages.)

by crosskeyd

Check out a product called MMS-Web Filter from Tumbleweed Communications.

www.tumbleweed.com

In addition to what you want to do, this is the only product I know of that can block Web Posts by Words, Sites, Users, or File Types.... (VeryGranular Policy Control)

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