MailControl Spam

MailControl Spam is an on-demand service, powered by BlackSpider, that intelligently identifies and blocks junk e-mail before it reaches your network.

Spam e-mail now accounts for over 70% of all e-mail received by organizations today. The growing volume of unwanted e-mail is placing unprecedented strain on existing IT infrastructures, reducing employee productivity and undermining e-mail's effectiveness as a business tool.

By blocking unwanted e-mail before it enters your network, MailControl eliminates the costs of spam. It also eradicates the potential legal liabilities of unwittingly exposing your employees to offensive content.

Why MailControl Spam is different

• Highly available global delivery network
• Industry-leading customer support - over 99% of our on-demand customers renewed the service last year
• SurfControl’s threat intelligence teams continuously improve effectiveness - increasing spam detection rates and reducing false positives
• Configurable, manageable and effective - IT retains control
• Eliminates over 98% of spam before it reaches your network
• Real-time, online policy management
• Advanced reporting and message tracking
• Spam policies configurable by users, groups and domains
• End-user self-service features allow users to manage their own quarantine area, including black and white lists, and view or release messages - reducing the burden on IT 30-day quarantine area

MailControl Spam - Key Benefits:

Spam filtering is a complex task. Protecting against the latest spamming techniques yet allowing the delivery of valid business e-mail takes specialist skills, time and resources that many already stretched IT organizations find hard to provide. Unwanted e-mail incurs costs which are avoidable with MailControl Spam – powered by BlackSpider.

How you gain with MailControl Spam

• MailControl Spam works at the Internet level; instantly preventing over 98%* of unwanted e-mail from reaching your network.
  • Spam doesn't transverse your Internet connection, freeing up valuable bandwidth
  • MailControl Spam stores spam in a secure quarantine area, away from your network
• SurfControl's Global Threat Experts are continually focused on defeating new spamming techniques, releasing your valuable IT resources to focus on other important tasks.
• End-user self-service empowers end-users to set personal spam definitions and manage their own quarantine areas, reducing their dependence on IT support and enabling greater productivity.

* Figure independently verified by West Coast Labs

MailControl Spam - How it Works:

E-mails are routed through SurfControl’s global delivery network and are protected from junk e-mail by MailControl Spam.

The adaptive spam filtering engine at the heart of MailControl Spam - and SurfControl’s threat analysis teams - constantly update rules and use all the techniques at their disposal for detecting today’s evolving spam.

Filtering techniques of MailControl Spam

• Lexical analysis - searching for key words and phrases in an entire e-mail (including the message envelope, headers, subject and body text) to measure the probability of a message being spam
• Real-time black lists - checking the IP addresses of sending machines to see if they are blacklisted known sources of spam
• Bayesian probability - using the known attributes of spam and valid e-mail to give each individual item a rating for the probability of it being spam
• Spam traps (or ‘honey-pots’) - e-mail accounts created simply to collect spam. If a message appears in just a small number of traps, it can be identified as spam and similar messages may be blocked
• Collaborative spam database - individual users forward spam to a central database where it is given a unique warning signature or hash that clearly marks it as spam
• Trend analysis - improves detection rates and lowers false positives by analyzing the history of e-mail sent from an individual machine
• White and black lists - configurable, customer-controlled lists of addresses or domains that organizations choose to block or accept
• Checksum database - checksums are created for a number of aspects of each email. This allows a new message to be compared to a database of known spam, malware and problem URLs.

These techniques establish a spam confidence score for every message. If a message score is above a pre-defined threshold, it is blocked from being delivered and held in SurfControl’s quarantine area, before it reaches corporate networks.

MailControl Spam - Features:

E-mails are routed through SurfControl’s global delivery network and are protected from junk e-mail by MailControl Spam.

The adaptive spam filtering engine at the heart of MailControl Spam - and SurfControl’s Global Threat Experts - constantly update rules and use all the techniques at their disposal for detecting today’s evolving spam.

Management and general features:

• Online customer management portal
• Online real-time policy management
• Portal access control model, allowing different users different levels of access
• Management dashboard providing a snapshot view of the service
• Online management of quarantined e-mail
• Quarantined e-mail held for up to 30-days
• Quarantined e-mail can be viewed and released by the administrator
• Administrator view of all message logs and delivery reports
• Customizable annotations on all inbound and outbound e-mail
• Configure different annotations based on users and domain names
• Annotations can be placed at the top, bottom or wrapped in a message

Reporting:

• Management reports on the volumes of messages processed
• Management reports, summarizing all messages processed and their spam scores

End-user self-service:

• End-users able to safely view - and release - quarantined messages through a Web interface in real-time

Spam filtering:

• Real-time black list analysis
• Lexical analysis, including message headers, subject and body
• Bayesian analysis
• Collaborative spam databases
• Trend analysis
• Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse analysis
• Spam traps (honey-pots)
• Black and white lists configured on a domain basis
• Configurable spam threshold on a domain basis
• Optionally tag spam in the subject line and deliver e-mail
• Optionally re-direct all spam messages to configurable e-mail address (junk mailbox)
• Optionally quarantine all spam e-mail
• Administrators can view quarantined messages & release, forward or delete through the customer portal

Download the SurfControl MailControl Data Sheet (PDF).