The SMTP Preprocessor

Note

This section applies to Snort 2 preprocessors. For information on Snort 3 inspectors, see https://www.cisco.com/go/snort3-inspectors.

The SMTP preprocessor instructs the rules engine to normalize SMTP commands. The preprocessor can also extract and decode email attachments in client-to-server traffic and, depending on the software version, extract email file names, addresses, and header data to provide context when displaying intrusion events triggered by SMTP traffic.