SpamSentinel 9: Total Email Protection
Protect your Users by Protecting your Email.
What is New in Release 9?
We have completely overhauled SpamSentinel to meet the needs of our customers.
When we built Version 1 in 2003, spam was the major issue. We were dealing with people trying to sell you something and filling your Inbox with unwanted commercial email messages.
Today, the biggest threat is from thieves, crooks and confidence men: People trying to steal from you. They want to steal money or information that they can use to sell for money. Either way, they are 100 times more dangerous than a “sales spam”.
For example, Fraud and Cryptolocker (and its variants), are very aggressive attempts at theft. This is a veritable deluge of new viruses, 10 times what we have seen in the past. Our response to these new outbreaks is to release fixpacks and upgrades more frequently, perhaps weekly, to respond to new attacks as they emerge.
This means that SpamSentinel R9 more aggressively removes messages from the mail stream.
New Anti-Spam Engine
We have replaced one of our three main engines with a more precise engine that has less false positives than its successor. This will reduce the need to whitelist. Whitelists provide an opening in protection through which spam and viruses can enter.
New Anti-Virus Engine and Approach
We have evaluated and chosen a major player as our anti-virus option. This will reduce missed viruses and pull unwanted viruses from the mail stream.
R9 no longer tries to clean zip files infected with viruses. If a file is infected, we send it to an administrative quarantine (= no end user access), or delete it. If we see one virus, we might miss another one, and the consequences of a virus infection are too great to allow this message to be delivered to the user.
Anti-Virus is no longer optional. We have built it into the core product due to ever-increasing virus threats.
More Aggressive Spam Blocking
R9 takes a more aggressive blocking approach. It will move messages to the quarantine or delete them if they are high probability spam without user review. There are too many spam messages with URL links to malicious sites to risk a user clicking the link and downloading a malicious virus.
Phishing
Phishing is an attempt to steal. Fraud attacks are attempts to steal money and information from organizations via targeted phishing attacks.
R9 companion product InboxGenius tackles fraud and phishing by using organizational knowledge inside email and corporate address books to identify forgeries.
Email Sender Identity
Identity in email is the next Best Practice. Email as an anonymous medium is susceptible to misuse and abuse. Recognizing a sender is a very strong indicator of good mail, and helps sort out incoming mail. Conversely, unknown senders also helps separate out incoming mail, too.
For example, strangers do not walk directly into the CEOs office from outside. They must go to a “waiting room”. Likewise, their email should not be allowed directly into the CEO’s Inbox without the CEO’s permission either. We have developed technology that can protect the Inbox from “Outsiders” (unknown senders) by putting them all into a "waiting room" aka "-Other Inbox". That email can be left in the "waiting room" forever. Or, the CEO can decide to allow the message into the Inbox by dragging and drop. Then, future emails from that sender will always appear in the Inbox.
This is our strongest feature protecting the Inbox, using sender Identity to protect the Inbox. |