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Complete coverage of the spam problem and how best to get rid of it without interfering with your regular email delivery.

The Spam Solutions White Paper covers three excellent solutions in spam filters, spam blockers, and spam appliances.

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Spam Filters

A spam filter tags incoming spam based on its internal rules and places it into a junk mail folder for each user or, in a corporate solution, deletes known spam and places suspect mail in a folder that can be searched for false positives.

The spam analysis rules can usually be influenced by the individual or company employing this solution.

Three popular spam filters are available from:

• Surf Control
• Cloudmark Authority
• GFiMailEssentials

	Surf Control Organizations are exposed to risk each time an employee sends or receives an e-mail. Surf Control targets both email and web content and source, all e-mail - incoming, outgoing and internal. Those risks can include: • Viruses in e-mail attachments • Productivity and bandwidth losses from spam • Leakage of confidential information • Lawsuits in response to offensive content E-mail Filtering lets you automatically and intelligently manage the threats in e-mail as defined by your policy. By managing e-mail traffic, the risks to productivity, network resources, legal liability and security can be significantly reduced. Content Range and Customization User-customizable dictionaries pre-populated with keywords and phrases found in risk e-mail - covers 16 categories ranging from "adult" to "finance". It also supports Boolean language filtering. Viruses and malicious code are serious and constant threats that plague all organizations. Viruses can run rampant through an e-mail network and a successful attack can cost an organization a great deal in lost network resources and user productivity. Surf Control’s anti-virus agent used in conjunction with SurfControl E-mail Filter provides complete e-mail security management. Protect your company from spam and junk e-mails such as chain letters, jokes, image files and screen savers that can clog your network and decrease your employee productivity. Anti-spam Agent’s unique digital signature filtering ensures accuracy and efficiency thus reducing time and resources in reviewing false triggers and provides scaling performance. The single click configuration saves your time and resources. Adaptive Reasoning Technology Objectionable content can emerge overnight - putting your organization at risk. To prevent this, Surf Control's Adaptive Reasoning Technology dynamically updates your filtering tools as new content appears. Here's how: Virtual Learning Agent is a unique adaptive reasoning technology that uses neural networks to filter spam mail and protect from other email risks - like confidential loss. The VLA can also be used as a content development tool to be trained on a repository of your organization's confidential data to build an extremely accurate neural network. Virtual Image Agent - Reduce potential legal liabilities by filtering out inappropriate adult images from your e-mail network. Using intelligent scanning technology, the VIA's sensitivity settings enable filtering based on your standards. Extensive Reporting Precise, detailed, fully customizable and easy to use and understand. Remote capabilities, too! Flexible, Easy to Use Rule Criteria Apply any e-mail usage criteria: content type, file type, bandwidth allocated, time-of-day, time spent online, groups or employees affected - it's up to you! More information is available at www.surfcontrol.com
	Cloudmark Authority Cloudmark Authority is easy to install, nearly transparent in operation, and requires only occasional updates. Authority plugs into existing email hardware and software and seamlessly integrates with your existing email system. It requires no additional hardware, firewall configurations, costly professional services, or constant tweaking and updating like other spam fighting products. Authority runs in memory and its lean runtime requirements only impact MTA performance by 5-10%, making it far and away the performance leader when compared to the usual impact of 40+% that competing applications consume, along with their needs for additional hardware and support. Operationally, Authority is simple: it receives a stream of SMTP messages from an SMTP source, analyzes the messages and assigns each message a confidence level, applies an action to the message based on the confidence value, and then returns the filtered stream back to the same SMTP source. To eradicate spam in a cost-effective way and in accordance with corporate policies, requires a server-based solution that intercepts spam at the corporate gateway, preventing it from entering the corporate email system. An appropriate server-based enterprise anti-spam solution must be scalable, capable of processing a high volume of incoming email without impeding its velocity. Migrating rules-based email filtering from the desktop to the enterprise network is inconsistent with these essential requirements. Cloudmark Authority introduces the first-ever automated process of capturing, analyzing, and predicting spam to generate powerful spamDNA. Drawing on the advanced biotechnology techniques used to map the human genome, Authority's breakthrough third-generation Genetic Classification technology stops spam at the gateway for large enterprises. Easily implemented, Cloudmark Authority installs into the existing network infrastructure, requires no investment in additional hardware, operates inside the corporate firewall, and preserves email and network security. Designed to handle high-volumes of email, Authority requires minimal administrative intervention and quickly pays for itself in restored employee productivity and reduced network traffic. Key Features: • highly scalable software • unparalleled accuracy • low cost of ownership • customizable mail-handling policies • rich end-user management Instead of depending on this near-continuous stream of updates, Authority only requires updating about once a month. Updating the spamDNA file, called a "cartridge," couldn't be simpler: • Windows - The spamDNA cartridge is a single .dll (dynamic link library) file of about 450 Kbytes. The new cartridge is installed as an update of the previous cartridge without taking Authority out of service. • Linux, Solaris - The spamDNA cartridge is a single .so (shared object) file of about 450 Kbytes. The new cartridge overwrites the previous cartridge without taking Authority out of service. Authority is a highly cost effective solution, especially for deployment in large organizations. Authority is typically deployed in companies with greater than 1,000 mailboxes and is priced as such. More information is available at www.cloudmark.com
	GFI Mail Essentials GFI MailEssentials offers spam protection at server level and eliminates the need to install and update anti-spam software on each desktop. GFI MailEssentials offers a fast set-up and a high spam detection rate using Bayesian analysis and other methods – no configuration required, very low false positives through its automatic whitelist, and the ability to automatically adapt to your email environment to constantly tune and improve spam detection. GFI MailEssentials will eliminate over 98% of the spam from your network. In addition to anti-spam, GFI MailEssentials adds key email tools to your mail server: disclaimers, mail archiving and monitoring, Internet mail reporting, server-based auto replies and POP3 downloading. GFI MailEssentials is the market-leading server-based spam solution. More than 20,000 companies worldwide use GFI MailEssentials to protect their mail servers from spam. Server-based anti-spam GFI MailEssentials is server-based and installs on the mail server or at the gateway, eliminating the deployment and administration hassle of desktop-based anti-spam products. Desktop-based anti-spam involves training your users to create anti-spam rules sets, and subsequently users have to spend time updating these rules. Besides, this system does not prevent your server message stores from filling up with spam. Bayesian filtering technology GFI MailEssentials features Bayesian filtering technology to detect spam based on message content. Rather than just checking for keywords, GFI's Bayesian filter takes the whole message into consideration as well as the content of valid emails that you send (known as 'ham'). This gives it a tremendous advantage over other anti-spam solutions that only take spam into account. Bayesian filters are widely acclaimed to be the best way to tackle spam because they use statistical intelligence to analyze the content of the mail. Downloads updates to spam profile database GFI MailEssentials can download updates to the Bayesian spam profile database from the GFI site, ensuring that it recognizes the latest spam and spamming techniques. GFI maintains the spam profile database by working with a number of spam collection organizations that continually supply spam samples. Sort spam to users' junk mail folders GFI MailEssentials gives you the flexibility to choose what to do with spam. You can delete it, move it to a folder, forward the spam mail to a public email address or folder, or send it to individual customizable folders (for example, a “junk mail” folder) in the end-users’ inboxes. This allows users to easily review mail that has been flagged as spam. 3rd party DNS blacklists (DNSBL) checking GFI MailEssentials supports third party DNS blacklists (real time black hole lists), which are databases of known spammers. If the sending mail server is on one of those lists, GFI MailEssentials marks the email as spam. GFI MailEssentials supports popular third party blacklists such as ORDB, SpamHaus, Spamcop or RBL. GFI also supports custom blacklists. Block foreign language spam GFI MailEssentials can block mail that uses particular character sets. For example, you can greatly reduce spam simply by blocking all mails written in Japanese, Russian, Korean, etc. Automatic whitelist management reduces false positives Whitelists enable you to ensure that mail from particular senders or domains are never flagged as spam, permitting more stringent anti-spam rules. GFI MailEssentials includes a patented automatic whitelist management tool, which automatically adds all business partners to your whitelist. This greatly reduces false positives, without any need for additional administration. Fake non-delivery reports (NDRs) GFI MailEssentials bounces spam back to the sender with a false non-delivery report. This NDR leads them to believe that your address is invalid, and gets your organization’s addresses off spam lists. Company-wide disclaimer/footer/header text GFI MailEssentials enables you to add disclaimers to the top or bottom of an email. Text and HTML formats are supported. You can include fields/variables to personalize the disclaimer. You can also create multiple disclaimers and associate them with a user, group or domain. Mail archiving to a database GFI MailEssentials allows you to archive all inbound and outbound Internet mail. This enables you to keep a back-up of all email communications and easily search for a required message. This also allows you to comply with SEC and other regulations that require you to archive email correspondence. Reports on spam filtering and mail usage The GFI MailEssentials reporter creates advanced reports on your inbound and outbound email. You can report on how much spam you filtered and what rules caught most spam. You can generate reports on user, domain and mail server usage. Mail monitoring The mail monitoring feature enables you to keep a central store of the email communications of a particular person or department. Because you can configure the mail to be copied to an email address, all email can be stored in an Exchange or Outlook store, so that you can easily search for email or content. Personalized server-based auto replies with tracking number With server-based, personalized replies, you can advise your customers that their message has been received and who will handle it. GFI MailEssentials assigns a tracking number to each reply and can also include attachments. POP3 downloader GFI MailEssentials includes a utility that can download mail from POP3 mailboxes. It supports both single and multiple recipient POP3 accounts. Seamless integration with Exchange Server 2000/2003 & 5.5 GFI MailEssentials integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003: It installs on the Exchange SMTP service and does not require gateway configuration. Via the SMTP protocol, it also works with Exchange 5.5, Lotus Notes and other popular SMTP/POP3 servers. More information is available at www.gfi.com

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Spam Filters

Surf Control

Cloudmark Authority

GFI Mail Essentials