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E-Mail Services
In today's fight against spam and mail-based worms and viruses, the tools necessary to stay ahead of the spammers and virus authors are growing increasingly complex and expensive. FilterCraft is an unprecedented method of filtering e-mail which not only prevents unwanted or hazardous messages from reaching your servers, it actually discourages senders of spam from sending to your address in the future. FilterCraft can drop seamlessly into your current e-mail environment, regardless of what platform your business runs on.
Security
FilterCraft contains embedded virus scanning and attachment filtering to reduce the exposure of your business to e-mail/attachment based viruses and worms. In addition to virus protection, there is a reduced exposure to potentially offensive and/or pornographic material which alleviates related employer concerns.
Efficiency
Since all filtering takes place off-site, no new hardware or software purchases are required. Also, since the current e-mail infrastructure no longer receives spam, no resources are wasted on processing, bandwidth, storage, or employees' time and energy sifting through them.
The Future
The problem with current anti-spam solutions is that they solve the wrong problem. They work by accepting a piece of mail, analyzing it, then delivering or not delivering it based on a set of rules. Unfortunately, the spammer then knows it's a good address, and will continue to send spam through, some of which will eventually get through the filters. Our solution stops more than 50% of the incoming spam *before* it is accepted, thus discouraging spammers from ever trying the same address again, effectively stopping the problem in it's tracks. If a spammers think the addresses are bad, they won't waste resources continuing to send spam, and the addresses themselves will be removed from lists that are constantly being swapped by the largest spammers.
FilterCraft takes a unique, multi-level approach to filtering mail. By applying filters at optimum points in the SMTP protocol, the maximum accuracy and resource efficiency is achieved.
Envelope Receipt Phase
Early in the SMTP protocol, a variety of behavioral statistics are applied to the remote SMTP server. Through constant research and statistical analysis of connection behavior, real-world FilterCraft use has shown that over 99.998%* of all viruses, spam, and worms can be rejected without analyzing the content at all. This has numerous benefits:
Bandwidth
Since most spam, viruses, and worms are never sent in the first place, no bandwidth is wasted receiving them only to have them rejected later by the virus and content filters.
Processing
Traditional content filtering is very expensive in terms of processing time and power. Many thousands of tests must be run against a message and combined in order to determine an arbitrary score, which then must be compared to an arbitrary threshold to determine whether or not a piece of mail is spam. Using this process with a large enough mail corpus over a lengthy period of time can create extremely effective filters. However, that does not make it less resource intensive. Envelope rejection makes this kind of content filtering much more attractive as the number of messages that get to the Data phase is drastically reduced.
Storage
With an increasing quantity of viruses, spam, and worms on the Internet, storing all of them has begun to take it's toll in SMTP servers. Even with virus protection and spam tagging, a message has to be received and stored somewhere in order to be analyzed. During outbreaks of new viruses or worms, or large bursts of spam, FilterCraft is able to easily keep up with the load since nearly all of the messages rejected consume minimal resources.
The Future
Most importantly, messages rejected at the Envelope are interpreted as undeliverable e-mail addresses. While this may not seem important, it actually discourages a spammer from sending to that address in the future. Content filtering methods accept the entire message and bounce it only after processing, which leads spammers to believe that the address is a good one to keep on their lists - whether then end user ever sees the message or not. This means that, as lists of e-mails get traded back and forth, addresses using FilterCraft will eventually just get less and less spam. The fewer spams that are sent, the fewer that can get through to user inboxes and waste time and resources.
These benefits drastically lower associated costs and extend the useful lifetime investment in existing infrastructure.
Data Phase
The Data phase is where most other content and virus filtering systems do the their work. While less than .002%* of mail that is rejected even gets this far, the additional filtering mechanisms in FilterCraft are quite important. FilterCraft's behavioral filtering blocks most illegitimate mail long before this phase, vastly diminishing the strain that content filtering puts on resources and allowing it to scale extremely well.
Virus Scanning
FilterCraft employs virus scanning which can identify viruses as attachments whether or not they are hidden in archived files (zip, rar, arj, etc) or written directly into the e-mail (iFrame exploits, etc). The signatures in FilterCraft's virus database are automatically updated throughout each day - often within minutes or hours of the release of a new virus.
MIME Sanity Verification
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions ("MIME") is the standard for encoding various types of content in e-mail messages. Nearly every legitimate e-mail client in existance conforms rather well to it's specifications. Typically, only hastily written spamming engines, viruses, and worms will not properly MIME encode e-mails.
Simple String Filtering
In addition to the complex content filtering outlined below, customizable string filtering ensures that no piece of e-mail containing a specified string (or strings) will ever be accepted.
Complex Rules-based and Bayesian-style Filtering
To complement the already phenomenal efficacy of the behavioral filtering of the Envelope Receipt phase, FilterCraft utilizes SpamAssassin, an advanced, Open-Source content filter. Even though a very small percentage of spam does exhibit the proper behavior to slip through the behavioral nets, SpamAssassin helps to stop it from reaching user inboxes with a complex and thorough series of content tests.
*Figures based on 3-month study from 11/03-1/04 encompassing 13 pre-existing domains and more than 1 million total message attempts. Individual results may vary.
config.com offers all the benefits of server side filters to get the most out of your email services! Virus scanning and SpamAssassin come standard with all hosted domains @config.com. Don't host your domain with config - No problem, we can still manage your email services by pointing MX records to our servers.
config.com's redundant server structure assures that email won't get bounced back to the sender if your Internet connection is severed for whatever reason. It's really amazing how many networks only have 1 mail server.
Email services available include: E-mail forwarding, commercial email server management, virus scanning, SpamAssassin, and list-server mailing list management.
Contact us to discuss your email services today! |
