Spam Filter
Unwanted email (spam) has evolved from simply being a nuisance to become a significant problem, especially for businesses. Spam affects employees' productivity, it introduces potential legal liability, and there are real costs to the recipients and their corporations. By some estimates, the amount of spam will triple over the next few years. FrontBridge has seen a 1600 percent increase in spam volume since we began managing email for customers in 2000.
The FrontBridge spam filter solution leverages the benefits of the FrontBridge network architecture, ensuring that filtered messages are delivered reliably and securely.
Multiple Layers of Spam Filtering
FrontBridge utilizes three layers of spam protection to analyze each piece of email and to detect and act on suspected spam.
- Blacklisting
Most commercial and public blacklists, such as MAPS and ORBZ/S, follow a "guilty until proven innocent" approach, which frequently blocks email from legitimate senders. That is why FrontBridge uses a proprietary blacklist that contains only the addresses of the most egregious spammers on the Internet.
- Fingerprinting
Messages not blocked by blacklisting are fingerprinted to detect matches with known spam message characteristics. FrontBridge's fingerprinting technology leverages knowledge gained from filtering mail for their entire customer base. Thereby allowing the fingerprinting process to become more intelligent and refined as more mail is processed.
- Rules-based scoring
FrontBridge assigns scores to messages based on more than 10,000 unique characteristics of spam and legitimate email. Points are added to the score if a message contains characteristics of spam; and points are subtracted if it contains many characteristics of legitimate email. When a message's score reaches a defined threshold, it is flagged as spam.
Spam Treatment
Most customers choose to quarantine messages identified as spam outside their network. Quarantined messages are stored and deleted after 30 days. Customers can review quarantined messages and retrieve improperly blocked messages through SpamShark, a Web-based tool.
As an alternative to quarantining messages, FrontBridge also allows spam to be sent through to customers. When FrontBridge forwards spam, it can modify the message to flag it for internal review.
Benefits
- Automatic spam filtering – No user interaction is required; and it is not necessary to set up of individual accounts
- Highly accurate filtering – Legitimate business email is not blocked.
- Hassle-free quarantine – Spam quarantined in SpamShark can be reviewed through the Web-based SpamShark interface; quarantined spam automatically expires after 30 days and is deleted.
- Improved network efficiency – Eliminating spam outside your network reduces the load on mail servers and results in network usage and storage savings.
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