A Secure Methodology for Filtering Spam & Malware in E-mail System and Secure E-mail Testbed Setup

E-mail system is one of the critical infrastructures of any organization. It is necessary to ensure that the mail servers in use should be secured in such a way that no security properties like confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity are compromised. To achieve these security properties we have setup a secure e-mail server testbed that provides security against malware and spam, and guaranties secure e-mail delivery. This paper proposes a secure methodology for filtering spam and malware in the e-mail system, comprising standard layers of protocols and policies. An experimental testbed is established to evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology and was tested with spam and malware e-mails. Our results showed an accuracy of 95 percent, against a typical configuration of an e-mail system.