‘Multi-server’ is an important new feature in GFI MailEssentials 2015. This feature enables communication between different GFI MailEssentials servers so that some configuration data can be shared across the servers.

For organizations with multiple email gateways and email servers, email security management can be a tedious task without a unified console. When a GFI MailEssentials multi-server network is setup, this problem is resolved once and for all, and day-to-day configuration tasks can be done using a single console.

A GFI MailEssentials multi-server network can be enabled by promoting one of the servers to be a master server while all the other servers are set to connect to it as slave. You can also define what you want to be synchronized between servers, or choose to have a centralized quarantine and reporting.

When everything is set up, each server will scan emails flowing through it; however the configuration is synchronized from the master server. Don’t worry, if there is some downtime on the master server, the slave servers will continue scanning normally.

In terms of reporting and quarantine data, all this data is queued on the slave server until the master server is back online. The quarantine can be accessed from the master server, and from there you can easily search, view and approve quarantined emails.

For any reports go to the reporting node on the master server and from there you can generate reports for either one or all the servers on the multi-server network.