Implementing Your Mimecast Email Security Solution with Neuways  – Technologist

Installation and configuration of your new email security 

Welcome 

This page explains the next steps in your Mimecast email security implementation and configuration now you have confirmed your purchase with Neuways. 

We aim to provide relevant information so that you know what to expect from your Mimecast email security implementation project, allowing you the time to plan the project into your business schedules. 

We will require information from your IT department for configuration purposes and advanced preparation in order to minimise potential disruption. 

Brought to you in partnership with  Mimecast

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What Happens Next? 

Here is what you can expect to happen between confirming your order with Neuways and having your Mimecast email security solution up and running. 

Contact 

Firstly, we will allocate you a dedicated Mimecast-certified engineer who will work with you throughout your implementation project. You will receive an email from your implementation engineer asking you to confirm some important information that we require in order to process your setup: 

Please note: It is extremely important that we are made aware of any websites or 3rd party hosted servers that send emails for any of your domains.  If we are not made aware of these then emails from them will most likely get rejected by your Mimecast email security solution until we are made aware of the issue and resolve it. 

Registration and Initial Consultation 

Once we have received the information requested in the initial set-up phase mentioned above, we will complete a registration process with Mimecast, which will activate your account. We will then proceed with adding any additional email domains that your business uses to your account and configure Directory Synchronisation with your on-premise Active Directory or your Office 365 Azure Directory. 

We will set up the Mimecast security policies in preparation for going live. Some of the policies we set by default include: 

• These scanning checks can use: 

• Checksum-based filtering 

There are many more policies we activate within the Mimecast email security solution, all of which can be tweaked to ensure you get the optimum protection for your business. 

Outbound Message Filtering 

We will make changes to your on-premise Exchange server or your Office 365 Exchange to send all outbound messages through Mimecast’s email security filtering. We will wait for 2 weeks to generate “auto-allow” lists (permitted senders you email regularly) before we enable advanced security policies, such as greylisting. 

Inbound Message Filtering 

After a 2-week settling-in period, we will make changes to your inbound mail flow so that emails are passed through Mimecast’s email security filtering before being delivered to your on-premise Exchange server or Office 365 Exchange. 

Incoming emails will be subject to much more stringent security checks than they have been before and could be blocked or rejected as a result. During this phase it is extremely important for all members of the business to be aware of the new security in place and to contact Neuways support should they believe emails they are expecting to receive are not coming through. 

Reviewing Messaging 

Emails will be checked by Mimecast policies. Depending on the policy, an email can be held, rejected, bounced, blocked, or permitted. 

Personal on hold: 

These emails have been placed on hold and are waiting to be either released or blocked. 

Bounced messages: 

If you or the sender receive any bouncebacks for emails, the emails that were sent will be located under bounced messages. 

Rejected messages: 

This will be a record of messages that have been sent to you that have been rejected. Rejected messages cannot be retrieved if they were rejected before Mimecast received the message information. An example of this is when a sending server is on a known blacklist. 

Blocked: 

You can add or remove individual email addresses that need to be either permitted or blocked, via permission and block lists. 

Permitted: 

This is a list of addresses that you have permitted in the past; you can also select to add these to the blocked list. 

There are several methods that can be used for reviewing messages: 

• Digests: This is an email sent to the user informing them of any emails in their Personal on-hold queue. A user can release held emails directly from the digest email they receive. 

• Personal Portal: Users can log in to the Mimecast Personal Portal to manage their own emails and review emails that are being held, rejected, permitted, or bounced. We recommend that, during the initial switchover, users log in to review their own message queues, especially if they are worried that emails they normally receive are being blocked. 

• Administrator Portal: We can create an admin account for your business’s onsite IT department where an administrator can review emails on a company-wide basis. Your implementation engineer will discuss this in more detail with you during a training and handover session. 

• Reports: Mimecast has a wealth of reports that can be configured to provide detailed information, statistics, and graphs for all aspects of mail flow through Mimecast filtering. If you are interested in receiving these reports, please discuss this with your implementation engineer. By default, Neuways configures Mimecast to hold blocked messages for all policies except the Spam Scanning policy. Messages held by the Spam Scanning policy will be marked for Personal Hold and can be released by end users. 

Post-Installation 

Once mail flow is complete, and all your emails are going through Mimecast, it may be necessary to make policy changes to ensure that Mimecast’s email protection is optimised for your business. This could include changing default actions for how held messages are dealt with, adding policy bypasses, amending SPF records, adding permitted or blocked senders, or whitelisting specific domains. Neuways support will continue to be available to help you with this.