How to Tackle Spam – The MailFoundry Way

If you are a regular user of email then you are more then likely aware of the problem that spam brings. A loss of productivity, risk of virus attacks, risk of getting your bank details stolen and it doesn’t stop there. Spam can take up 80% or more of your mail box each day and the time needed to sift through this can be both frustrating and time consuming. For a business, the delivery of email is critical and being plagued with spam causes issues. The business owner is left with a choice. Either you let all email through, or you use a spam filter. Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as that though because both methods bring their problems. If you filter email then you need to be sure you filter the bad only, and if you receive all the email then you need to make sure you do not get trigger happy on that delete key and accidentally delete a good email. It’s really a no win situation. Other options such as a challenge response is an option, but really these are not too effective. For example you buy a book from a website and it sends a confirmation email. The sellers checkout will not respond to that challenge response and you might not get that email either. Luckily there is an option out there for business which can help productivity increase and the spam go down.

The MailFoundry antispam appliance attempts to solve both problems while keeping your mail box full of email you want and empty of email you don’t want. The MailFoundry is an antispam appliance which comes in a 1U form factor for rack mounting. It uses a linux OS and is a fully managed anti spam solution. Using the MessageIQ engine it is capable of blocking 99% of spam before it hits your mail box and has a false positive rate of 1 in 1000000. To achieve this blocking ability the MessageIQ engine uses spam definitions (much like virus definitions) which are updated every 5 minutes. The definitions are created by humans and they do not work on a rule based system. If it’s spam it is included and if it isnt spam then it is permitted through and passed on to your mail server. For those worried about the system and it blocking good emails then the quarantine digests are for you. They can be set to update you hourly, daily, weekly etc… and give you a full run down of what messages have been blocked. Just as a side note, I have been using this service since April 2006 and not had a single good email hit my quarantine.

The MailFoundry anti spam appliance not only blocks emails, virus’s etc… it also reduces load on your own mail server because cutting out 80% or so of email you can save some serious money if you run a busy mail server.

With it’s built in control panel it allows you to set up your own rules and determine how spam is handled. Graphs showing usage and what was blocked and why are presented here and show you just how much of a problem spam was.

Conclusion
Since introducing the MailFoundry 2100 in to our business 10 months ago, we have seen a number of good remarks and also productivity rise. I will be honest and say that it wasnt plain sailing all of the 10 months, but those problems were ironed out quickly and now it all appears to be running with out fault.

Via: TechAsis and MailFoundry.