People in such situations are faced not only with the time and cost to clean their own machines, but also with the embarrassment of explaining the ensuing virus e-mail sent to their friends and clients. Businesses are finding that the damage to their client relationships can be severe, and there has been a growing awareness that businesses may be liable for damages done to the recipients of such worms as a result of the businesses' negligence.

It's instant! Benign won't slow your computer or e-mail retrieval down, you'll just keep downloading your e-mail as usual.

It's so simple to setup, just import your accounts into Benign and you're done. Benign picks up your e-mail before your e-mail program does and neutralizes or strips out the bad stuff. You don't have to change anything about how you normally receive your e-mail, just receive e-mail as you normally would and Benign will neutralize the nasties as they enter your computer.

At any time, you can make Benign issue a comprehensive report on which e-mail it has stripped of certain nasties, or attachments that have been renamed or stripped.

To make things easy, you have the option of 3 preset levels of security, all of which can be further customized to your needs, or you can create your own security levels. Through the configuration options you have complete flexibility to control behaviour such as blocked and renamed attachments, stripping out HTML, turning on privacy features, and many other options.

How do we offer the best customer support?

Because we have full-time staff whose jobs are purely to help you get the best from Benign.

Under normal circumstances, we answer all e-mail from registered users within 24 hours, every single day of the week and weekends

You get technical support, free upgrades and enhancements for 1 year.

Attachments can contain viruses or other threats. Some e-mail programs allow these attachments to run automatically as soon as a user previews a message. The most virulent virus ever, the Klez virus exploits this vulnerability. Benign can strip these attachments out or just rename them so they won't run.

E-mail can contain embedded images to track those who read their messages. As soon as you preview the e-mail, it will send back information to the sender to say you have read their message and so the sender knows you have a working address and can send you more junk. Benign strips out this identifier information.

Most e-mail programs are able to be exploited by viruses and e-mail worms. Benign can prevent you being a victim of this vulnerability.

> Will Benign alter any of my computer settings?

The only thing Benign will do is add a .b9 extension on to the end of your POP3 settings. So, if you have your ISP as Earthlink, it will change it from mail.earthlink.net to mail.earthlink.net.b9 This allows Benign to pick up the e-mail and process it before passing it on to your e-mail program.

> Will Benign alter the way my e-mail look?

Benign won't alter how your messages look, unless you have decided to strip out all HTML which will mean you will only get the text version of your message.

> How does Benign work?

If you're not using Benign, your mail program downloads new messages by contacting the remote server on which your e-mail is currently stored. You will be exposed to all the vulnerability e-mail holds.

If you do use Benign, your e-mail program will contact Benign, instead of the remote server. Benign will then send the command to the remote server and intercept the e-mail, then filter and process the e-mail before passing the neutralized message on to your mail program. This is all done instantly with no delay.

> What happens inside Benign?

When an e-mail is intercepted by Benign, the key information is extracted and then every aspect of the e-mail is completely rewritten with the information presented free of any malicious code. Likewise any attachments that can be used maliciously are quarantined with a new extension that makes it impossible for them to be automatically executed. This way Benign protects not only against known security problems but also against a large number of attacks yet to be discovered.

> Is Benign an anti-virus program?

No, Benign is not an anti-virus program in the strict sense of the word. In order to catch viruses, Anti-virus products match up known viruses with a virus signature. Therefore the virus has to be known. Benign works in a way that will quarantine suspected attachments so they can't run automatically. Benign will catch all known and future e-mail viruses and worms, but cannot catch viruses downloaded from the internet or transferred from disk. Therefore it is still advisable to run an updated anti-virus program.

For a better comparison of how Benign differs from Anti-Virus software, consult the graph below.

These are:

1. Quick guide to getting started and using Benign.
2. Tips, Tricks and helping you understand what Benign does for you.
3. Information about e-mail threats and how Benign can help.

Enterprise and Site License Inquiries

• Reorganised HTML processing options for both message text and attachments to make them easier to understand.
• Added configuration option to control the length of time message logs are stored for.
• Added button in the message logs/summary form to clear the logs and/or summaries.
• Added mail account import support for IncrediMail.
• Updated mail account import support for Pegasus Mail to work with Pegasus Mail 4.11.
• Minor improvements to HTML-to-plain-text converter.
• Changed handling of extremely long lines to work around mail server.
• Changed handling of invalid text in message header to improve consistency with major mail clients, now removes the invalid line and continues with the header.
• Changed handling of MIME parts with invalid Content-Transfer-Encoding, now changes them to 8bit instead of blocking them (noticed with spam found in the wild).
• Fixed handling of multipart/digest MIME subentities with missing Content-Type, now changes them to be message/rfc822.
• Fixed handling of multipart/related MIME parts, now copies certain extra parameters.
• Changed handling of certain invalid sequences in HTML to improve consistency with major browsers/mail clients.
• Changed filtering of whitespace in HTML URLs to improve consistency with major browsers/mail clients.
• Fixed problem with security profile file type entries with a blank extensions list.
• Removed Netscape cookie manager warning message added in 1.36, situation confirmed harmless.
• Added workaround for problem encountered when using the Cache Cleaner ZoneAlarm Pro 4.

As the owner of a computer consulting business, many of my customers are computer novice and frequently get viruses or harmful HTML e-mail send to them which are opened immediately and BANG, the virus infected their computers.

Then I heard about BENIGN and wondered how good and helpful it would be. I tested BENIGN on four of my own computers. Usually I get about 200 e-mails a day, 80% is SPAM ( MailWasher PRO takes care of this issue ), some of them have, of course attachments. Mostly HTML or strange file types. Needless to say, most of them are harmless, but there were situations, where a harmful attachment ( like an .vb file ) could had infected my computer, if a novice user had opened this e-mail. But since I am running BENIGN, the program has taken care of that and renamed the file, so I needed to take some action and was aware of the harmful attachment. BENIGN has also a great log file so you can see the e-mails processed each day. You also can configure higher or lower security for known domains.

In the future, I will recommend to all my customers to install BENIGN on their systems, in combination with MailWasher PRO a perfect solution to keep harmful SPAM OFF their computers.

The "Firetrust-Guys" have done a great job and I would recommend both programs to all users who have to deal with e-mails.

Tom S. ( Queek Creek, Arizona, USA )

Dear Firetrust, for a senior citizen like me this was easy to set up and use, for a few bucks I now feel more secure about viruses.

thanx

-unknown-

Hi, there,
Just wanted to let you know I tried benign and before when I?d let all those mails through that would seem to log on to web sites or do something like that anyway, now I don?t have that problem.
D.P.Heath