Spam Filtering and Virus Protection

Spam Filtering

It is estimated that 85% of all email traffic on the Internet is spam. Spammers are growing wiser on a daily basis, learning new methods to manipulate common spam defences and obtaining more sophisticated software to trick spam filters and penetrate email inboxes. In order to win the war against spam, businesses must evolve their spam defences faster than spammers evolve their techniques.

Our Spam Filtering system accomplishes this by gathering real-time spam intelligence from a number of sources and then actively using this intelligence to block the spam. We track tens of thousands of live spam email characteristics ("DNA"), which alone identify the majority of spam. In addition, a number of third-party spam databases, several DNS checks, and several message-formatting tests are used when analysing each email. We aggregate all of this data into a collection of several thousand constantly evolving spam tests that are performed on every email that enters the email hosting system.

The results of these tests are combined together to identify more than 98% of spam with virtually zero false-positives.

Filtering Highlights

• Thousands of email characteristics ("DNA") are used to identify spam
• 25 third-party spam databases, several DNS checks, and message-formatting tests are also used when analysing each email
• DNA and other data are used to perform more than 45 tests on every email
• Tests are combined into a weighting system and assigned a value
• When the total weight of an email is greater than a certain sensitivity threshold it will be flagged as spam
• Integrates with Return Path and Bonded Sender to minimize false-positives

User Controls

• Sensitivity can be controlled by administrators and end users
• Email users can add senders, domains, and IPs to their safelist to ensure that email from these senders is never filtered as spam
• Email users can add senders, domains, and IPs to their blacklist to ensure that email from these senders is always filtered as spam
• Email users have several options for handling email once it is flagged as spam
• Email users can choose the exclusive setting, which allows them to block email from senders outside of their safelist