ANTI SPAM

Anti-spam is the protection of legitimate users from unwanted e-mail. This involves a variety of technologies delivered in software, appliance or hosted service (SaaS) form.

An early technique for removing spam was filtering email. This approach processes incoming messages against a set of specified criteria and decides whether to pass the message through to the user's mailbox, quarantine in a junk folder, or drop the message entirely. But filtering is a reactive approach and can take as long as one hour before rule updates are pushed out. This leaves a window of opportunity for spam outbreaks and computer virus abuse.

A DNSBL (DNS-based blackhole list, block list, or RBL) is a compilation of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that have been identified as a source of spamming. The effectiveness of blacklisting has diminished with the rise of botnets (networks of malicious software) and decentralized spamming sources. Messaging abuse has become more complex in the last year with the rise of new 'hit and fade' botnet attacks or 'slow drip' campaigns that evade blacklist detection.

Successful antispam involves a layered approach encompassing a robust mail transfer agent (MTA), email throttling, content filtering, reputation blacklist, and behavioural analysis like traffic shaping to avoid senders continuously wasting bandwidth and connections. MailChannels Traffic Control offers a software solution for all those areas and more. There is nothing to update or maintain, so you can focus on proactive activities that advance your organization.