The email you receive can often hide malicious viruses, worms, scripts and tracking images which can activate without you knowing. Most security software tries to solve this by scanning for specific problems they're aware of, but this doesn't help when a new variant or new vulnerability is exploited, meaning your computer still gets infected. More often, people don't patch their computers or update their software regularly meaning they're readily exposed to new threats and privacy breaches.
Benign solves this security problem by neutralizing your email. It pulls apart the email, removes the code that makes viruses, worms and scripts and other potentially harmful things run, and then rewrites the email so it looks exactly the same, but is effectively neutered. All this happens instantly and works seamlessly with your email program to protect your privacy and computer.
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. For example, 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 email and process it before passing it on to your email program.
Will Benign alter the way my email 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 email is currently stored. You will be exposed to all the vulnerability email holds. If you do use Benign, your email program will contact Benign, instead of the remote server. Benign will then send the command to the remote server and intercept the email, then filter and process the email before passing the neutralized message on to your mail program. This is all done instantly with no delay.
What happens inside Benign?
When an email is intercepted by Benign, the key information is extracted and then every aspect of the email 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 extenstion 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 email 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.
Benign works fast, doesn't slow down your e-mail routine, does its job effectively and is transparent when running. An excellent weapon to add to your e-mail arsenal. Highly recommended.
Howard Carson of Kickstartnews.com
As the owner of a computer consulting business, many of my customers are computer novices and frequently get viruses or harmful HTML email sent to them which are opened immediately and BANG, the virus infected their computers. Then I heard about Benign software and wondered how good and helpful it would be. I tested Benign on four of my own computers. Usually I get about 200 emails a day, 80% is spam (MailWasher Pro software takes care of this issue), some of them have, of course attachments. Mostly HTML or strange file type. Needless to say, most of them are harmless, but there were situations, where a harmful attachment (like an .vb file) could have infected my computer, if a novice user had opened this email. 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 software has also a great log file so you can see the emails processed each day. You can also configure higher or lower security for known domains. In the future, I will recommend to all my customers to install Benign software on their systems, in combination with MailWasher Pro software, 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 emails.
Tom S. (Queek Creek, Arizona, USA)
