Executive Summary
How effective is it?
Requirements
How It Works - An Example
How It Works - Filtering In General
How It Works - Technical
Setup - How To
Customization
Administration
Executive Summary
To use our Spam blocker and filtering service it is necessary to change how your email gets delivered. This is not as big of a deal as it sounds. Basically it's just one phone call to your web hosting service, which we can do for you. Other than that there is virtually no setup (see Setup - How To).
Once you are up and running with us (in as little as 1 hour) all incoming email filters through our servers. We automatically run a battery of tests on each message and quarantine any spam and/or viruses. We then pass along all legitimate email to your server.
This is how high-level spam filtering works at many Fortune 500 companies.
Your server only receives legitimate email (see diagram at right).
All quarantined spam messages are held on our server for a period of time determined by you (up to 5 days) before they are permanently deleted. During this time you have complete access to any filtered items via our secure Web Quarantine Site.
Our spam filtering process is fully automated and only adds about a second or two to delivery time, even under very high volume.
Emergency backup occurs when your company's servers go down and you are unable to receive email. Our system will temporarily hold all your incoming email and then automatically deliver it to you when your servers are back up and running. This eliminates any chance of missing important messages due to power failures, server crashes, or whatever. This emergency backup feature is highly valued by our existing clients and is included as part of our standard subscription.
We offer a monthly spam filtering subscription with no long term commitment or obligation, and right now we're also offering a 30 day free trial. And we mean free trial - you don't have to give us a credit card and we won't just automatically start billing you in 30 days. So try our spam blocker for one month at no cost. If you don't like the results then don't sign up, there'll be no questions asked. If you do like our spam filtering service and want to continue, we'll set up a billing plan that meets your needs.
Pricing - pricing plans for out spam blocker and filtering service.
Frequently Asked Questions - most common spam blocker questions.
Get Started - how to sign up for our spam blocker and filtering service.
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How effective is it?
98.2% catch rate (leads the industry for managed spam filters)
99.9% false-positive protection
Catch Rate is the percentage of spam email caught by an anti-spam solution. It measures the efficiency of the solution at identifying and stopping spam.
False Positive is when an anti-spam engine blocks a legitimate message by error, on assumption that it is spam.
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Requirements
The only requirement is that your company must have its own domain. Our filtering service will not work if you use email from providers like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If your email address is something like you@yourcompany.com (versus you@hotmail.com) then everything will work fine.
Your email server does not need to be physically present in your office. If someone else manages your email server for you, that's ok too.
Our managed spam blocker service operates independently of server platforms, so it will perform well whether you run Windows, Linux, Sun, or anything else. Also, is doesn't matter which email software you use. Microsoft Exchange, Sendmail, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, Post.Office, iPlanet, etc. Our spam filter works well with all of them.
Again, no changes are made to your system, there are no downloads, and there is no software to install.
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How It Works - An Example
Once you are set up, the only immediate difference you will notice is the lack of spam in your inbox.
Periodically you will receive an email titled 'Quarantine Report' (screenshot at right). This email lists all of the suspected spam and viruses that were recently sent to you and that are currently being held in a quarantine section on our servers. By default the report is sent to each user once per day, but this can be customized.
Normally you will do nothing with this report, but you may want to scan it once in a while just to see what's getting filtered.
If you do scan this report and find that an email is getting blocked that you would like to receive, you can click on a link and release the message from quarantine. You also have the option of adding any sender to a 'Trusted Senders' list. Trusted senders never have their email blocked.
You can also access our Web Quarantine site to check your blocked email in real time (see screenshots at right). At this site you can fine tune your spam filtering options, add senders to a blocked or trusted list, get your spam filtering statistics, etc. This site is password protected and very secure. Although most users will never feel the need to access the site, many of our clients appreciate the fact that they can fully customize their spam filtering service.
Speaking of customization, there are a number of ways you can modify our spam service to suit your needs both on an individual and company-wide basis. For example, you can set different filtering levels for spam, viruses and forbidden attachments. You can also choose how to deal with any items flagged by our filters - from immediate deletion of all spam to quarantine of all spam to tag/pass-through.
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How It Works - Filtering In General
There are basically three ways to stop Spam:
- Stop Spam at your email server.
- Stop Spam at your desktop computer.
- Stop Spam before it gets to your server and desktop computer.
We do number three. For most businesses this option is the least expensive, most effective, and easiest system of the three to implement. Here are the pros and cons of each:
1. Stop Spam at your email server.
This option involves either installing off-the-shelf spam software on your email server
or buying a specialized computer system that operates in conjunction with your
server. Larger companies tend to use a dedicated computer, while smaller companies usually try off-the-shelf software.
Blocking spam with a separate computer can be
effective but can also be very expensive (thousands of dollars) and it requires constant administration.
Someone must maintain the filtering system, apply patches, maintain separate backups,
etc. Most small and mid sized businesses can't justify the additional
expense in hardware, software and personnel, and thus choose not to employ
this method.
Off-the-shelf spam software packages, on the other hand, just cant keep up with the constantly changing tactics of sophisticated spammers. The spam software packages update too infrequently and allow (in our view) far too much spam and viruses to pass through. Off-the-shelf spam software may be marginally useful as a backup filter or for home use but not as your first line of spam defense.
2. Stop Spam at your desktop computer.
This option involves installing spam software on each individual
computer to filter each user's email. While this method is usually
adequate for home use, it is generally not recommended for business
settings. The main problems with this method are cost, administration
and security.
Cost. Spam software of this nature requires buying separate licenses for each machine, which, depending on the size of your office, can get quite expensive. There are some inexpensive spam-blocking programs available, but they generally are not up to the heavy lifting required for business-level filtering.
Administration. Tech support costs (and headaches) usually increase as the number of software licenses increases. Software updates and patches must be applied to each machine regularly, and since users can modify their own spam and virus settings, any misconfiguration may require tech support resources to fix.
Security. Since every computer is its own personal spam firewall any software misconfiguration increases the likelihood of potentially harmful viruses, worms or trojan horses entering the company network. If one employee misconfigures, everyone could suffer.
3. Our way - Stop Spam before it
gets to your server and desktop computer.
Our system gives you the effectiveness of a stand-alone spam firewall at a fraction of the cost - and we handle all the administration. There's virtually
no setup, no administration, and no long term commitment. It's a
pay-as-you-go spam filtering plan designed for small and mid-sized businesses.
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How It Works - Technical
We operate and maintain a high-end, enterprise-level spam and virus filtering system. We sell access to our spam blocking system on a pay-as-you-go, subscription basis. For small and mid-sized businesses it's much cheaper to use our filtering system than it is to build or buy one of their own.
We have partnered with leaders in the spam filtering industry. We run the same spam filtering systems in use at many Fortune 500 companies. The only way for small and mid-sized companies to have access to this level of spam-blocking firepower if to subscribe to a service like ours. The companies who develop these software packages do not offer subscription services and the cost of purchasing these high-end spam systems outright is highly prohibitive.
Our spam filtering engine, developed by our industry-leading partners, works this way:
The system uses an array of spam detection technologies that are each given their own weight in the final decision of whether a message is spam or not. The weight given to each separate detection method has been defined over years of experience fighting spam. Unfortunately, the detailed workings of these filtering technologies is closely guarded proprietary information and cannot be fully disclosed, however here's a top-level overview.
When a message is parsed through the spam filtering system, the following happens:
- The email is purified;
- Any obfuscation methods are detected;
- A proprietary MIME parses the email;
- The parser resists any hacker tricks attempting to crash it;
- The system detects invisible ink, misleading HTML addresses and known patterns;
- A mix of bayesian, heuristic, and statistical analysis along with artificial intelligence scans the email and decides whether it is a spam or not;
- The email is statistically categorized.
Input
The input into the system is a single email message.
Output
The output is only legitimate email, which is passed to the client's email
server. Behind the scenes, however, a lot happens...
Based upon this analysis, including any customized user preferences, the system makes the final determination whether to quarantine a message or pass it on. This all happens in less that one second, even during peak load times.Spam probability:
The system calculates the probability of a message being spam. This number will be between -1000 (definite non-spam) and +1000 (definite spam).
Analysis Result:
The system also calculates a code based on the above probability stating whether it is PROBABLE SPAM, LIKELY SPAM, POSSIBLE SPAM or NON SPAM.
Spam Categories:
The system then determines the probability of a spam belonging to a specific category. The supported categories currently include:
- Hoaxes
- Money-related spam
- Adult / Pornographic spam
- Goods-related spam
- Health-related spam
- Patterns, Miscellaneous spam
Updates every 15 minutes
Spam is a moving target, and a good anti-spam engine is constantly evolving. Spammers are creative. To survive they must ensure that their unsolicited messages reach their unwilling audience. Only a solution that adapts to new spam quickly can hope to make an impact.
Our filtering system receives spam definition lists every 15 minutes from an active database of millions of spam messages maintained by our industry-leading partners. Tens of thousands of spam messages are added to this database daily.
Bottom Line
The spam blocker and filtering engine we use is by far the most powerful anti-spam engine in the industry today.
With its unparalleled catch rate, it is the logical choice to assure high performance and reliability for a demanding clientele. And, with its automatic spam and virus updates, it guarantees that businesses will have a spam solution that evolves over time and stays ahead of spammers.
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Setup - How to
Setup for our spam blocker and filtering service is quite simple.
All that is required is that your company's MX record must be switched to direct email to our servers. When you contact us we will give you the correct settings. If you do not know how to do this, we can assist you..
If you ever decide to cancel our service simply switch the MX record back. It's that simple.
Special feature for users of Microsoft Exchange:
"MS Exchange Server Protection" is a special feature we offer that automatically blocks Dictionary or NDR attacks attempted against servers running Microsoft Exchange.
A Dictionary or NDR (Non-Delivery Report) attack is a sequence of spam messages that attempts delivery to every possible recipient name on a server. Microsoft Exchange attempts to protect against Dictionary attacks by accepting messages for all recipients rather than rejecting invalid recipients and letting a spam sender know which accounts are valid. Unfortunately, this often leads to very high Exchange server CPU loads because the server still attempts to send one or more non-delivery notification for every invalid recipient.
We offer a feature called "MS Exchange Server Protection". This is an LDAP lookup that will work with any LDAP server. It protects your mail server from dictionary attacks by using an LDAP query to check that the recipient of a new message has a valid mailbox on your mail server. This premium service is highly valued by our clients who current use MS Exchange.
What this means is that our server must be able to verify valid accounts. With Microsoft Exchange this is accomplished by creating a 'dummy' user account on the end server and giving that account minimal read permissions so that it may access the Active Directory.
This account is used solely to verify legitimate users and poses no threat to system security.
Please refer to our detailed instructions (pdf) for setting up a 'dummy' account. Account setup is a simple process that we can help you with this if needed.
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Customization
Customization of our spam blocker and filtering service can take place on both an individual and company-wide level.
Most clients find no need to customize their spam filtering. Our default settings seem to work quite well. For those who wish to do so, however, spam filter settings can be customized to a high degree.
Users can customize their spam blocking two ways - by logging into their account on our website or by clicking on links in the Spam Quarantine Report they receive periodically.
In the Quarantine Report (screenshot) users can click on a link to release a particular message from quarantine and then also have the option of adding that sender to a 'Trusted Senders' List. For most users this is all the customization they'll require.
For more advanced spam settings, users can log into their account on our website (screenshot). Here they can...
- Add senders (even entire domains) to a 'Trusted Senders' list.
- Add senders (even entire domains) to or a 'Blocked Senders' list.
- Choose how often they receive their Spam Quarantine Reports.
- Set the filtering level for attachments and how they are handled.
- Set the filtering level for potential viruses and how they are handled.
- Set the filtering level for each category of spam and how these messages are handled.
Categories of spam include Hoaxes, Adult Spam, Patterns,
Goods, Health, Money, Miscellaneous, and Custom Spam. Handling options
for spam, viruses and attachments include Immediate Delete, Quarantine,
or Tag and Pass Through. Spam filtering levels range from Disabled to
Extreme.
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Administration
Each user "administers"
their own spam filtering account through the customization features described above.
It takes about 5 minutes over the phone to explain
the admin features to the designated Power User.
In addition, our customer service staff is always
available and can assist the Power User or anyone else in the company with any questions
they might have about our spam blocker and filtering service.
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Related Links
Frequently Asked Questions - common spam blocker questions.
Pricing - monthly pricing plans for our spam filtering service.
Subscribe to our spam blocker service
Download our Spam Service Brochure
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