email protection anti malware & spam feature, how to check if it works

Question

I've got my mailserver setup behind a sophos home edition free firewall. 
 I think i i've setup the e-mail protection accordingly, but how can i check i mail goes through the security features (i do receive email.., but want to make sure malware and antispam is working). 
 
 Kind Regards, 
 Gerard

Badrobot · Answer

Hi Gerard, 
 
 This can be tricky, I ran into a similar situation recently, I wanted to see the differences in email protection for a few different layers of defense I have in place. But how do you send a virus via email without risking infecting anything. 
 Well you can use the EICAR code which is essentially a fake virus, well not fake, it is malicious code its just malicious code that does not do anything and is used for security testing. 
 It can be found here: https://www.eicar.org/?page_id=3950 
 Now you then have the challenge of e-mailing the code, since most web based emails wont allow you to attach it how do you get it to your email to see, well what I did was spin up a ubuntu server, put it in the DMZ and use the mail code in terminal to send an email from the server to my own email within the LAN while having the EICAR in a file as an attachment. 
 
 Worked pretty good and gave me a way to test out some features.