What you need to do for Clean & Filtered Email...

Scan your e-mail traffic for Viruses?

Reduce time wasted dealing with Spam?

Prevent offensive material from entering your organisation?

SFG (Spam Filter Guard) gives you the power to monitor and filter e-mail traffic to protect your organisation from virus attacks, spam mails and wasted bandwidth right at the Internet level. SFG provides for virus-free and spam-free mail. All the unwanted emails (containing spam and virus) are filtered on our Internet server before they reach your mail server and the intended recipients.

Salient Features of Spam Filter Guard

• Triple-level Virus Scanning.
• Multi-layered Anti-Spam capabilities stop 90-95% of Spam.
• Spam Analysis Engine with auto-updates and auto-learning
• Personal White lists and Black lists allow/block emails from specific IDs/domains
• Real-time Black hole Lists capture data from global spam servers to block spam.
• 24 Hr. backup if your Email Server is down.
• Reports on email trends, viruses detected, spam volumes, policy violations.
• Content filtering.

 

Email spam and virus are major problems; hence there is a great challenge to eliminate these twin threats. SFG provides the enterprise with excellent spam and virus filtering from an enterprise approach. In doing so, end-user productivity is increased and improved. Most importantly, security vulnerabilities can be identified, reduced and eliminated before email arrives at the corporate email servers. The primary advantage of this service is that email is examined thoroughly at the Internet level before sending it to the internal email server, hence minimising the impact of spam and viruses on the end user.

 

Scans all e-mail passing through it for viruses through three different anti-viruses software to ensure maximum protection.

Attachments containing viruses or other security problems are removed .All safe content is delivered untouched, while this service will remove the vast majority of known email viruses , viruses can also infect computers in other ways. For maximum protection, We therefore recommend that your also run anti-virus software on each of your computers. While no service or software can guarantee that 100% of all viruses will be caught, S F G offers an additional strong level of virus protection with its triple-level scanning.

A multi-layered Anti-Spam capability stops 90-95% of Spam……

Completely different set of actions can be applied to spam scoring above a "High Score" threshold value.

Spam can be tagged, rejected, discarded, archived or forwarded to other addresses for inspection by administrators w ith the initial, default settings, our Anti-Spam service will "out of the box" block 90 to 95% of all Spam. Most of the remaining Spam will actually be bypassing our service due to tricks that spammers use. The Bayesian database support in SFG tries to identify Spam by looking at what are called tokens; short phrases that are commonly found in Spam or ham. (Ham is e-mail that is not Spam.) Each token is given a small score; together these scores rate the email as Spam if above administrator defined levels.

Spam Analysis Engine with auto-updates and auto-learning.

The SFG Spam Analysis is automatically updated daily with feedback from global servers. In addition, it can be trained by users who can provide it with examples of spam mail.

 Personal White lists and Blacklists allow/block emails from specific IDs/domains/IP’s……

 An important feature of SFG is that you can create a personal "White list" to ensure that your important clients and other contacts will never be blocked, even if their mail system somehow ends up blacklisted. You can White list by IP address, email address and/or content. Since SFG depends partially on other organisation's “blacklists", we maintain a "Global White list" for all customers, and will consider your suggestions.

The primary entries in our global White list consist of Major legitimate newsletters and mailing lists legitimate companies in countries that are otherwise blocked.

You can also create a personal "blacklist" to block email from certain sources. It does not need be Spam; it can be used to block someone who is harassing your employees. Or you might want to block recruiters who are trying to steal your employees.

You can blacklist by IP address, email address and/or content. For example, if junk@baddomain.com is harassing you, all emails from him can be completely blocked. Such blocked emails can be save at SFG Database at https://reports.spamfilterguard.com

Real-time Black hole list captures data from global spam servers to block spam content filtering……

Several organizations and companies are constantly identifying the mail servers, which are actively sending Spam. They create "real-time blacklists" (RBL) of the IP addresses of these mail servers, which are updated daily, even hourly. We have chosen four of the better known RBLs for selection within the SFG service. (By default, all are selected.) Our main criterion was to choose RBLs which are least likely to block legitimate email.

A good blacklist not only quickly adds a new Spam source, but also removes it when it is no longer sending Spam. Spam is often sent through "open relays", which are legitimate mail servers, which have been (trivially) "hacked" by spammers. Typically, the owner of the mail server learns of this within a day and then fixes the problem. Therefore, mail systems should not be blacklisted any longer than necessary.

Content Filtering……

! Allows/denies attachments based on filename, providing implementation of any email security policy. Easily used to block attachments which are common ways of disguising viruses, e.g. ReadMe.doc.exe .These can be varied for different users.

! HTML-based Attacks! Scans for common signs of attack such as <I Frame> and <Object Codebase=…> HTML tags. Both have been used many times to exploit vulnerabilities in Outlook (& Express) and Internet Explorer.

Dangerous HTML content can be stripped. Checks and traps added for all known Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Eudora security vulnerabilities.

SFG Reliability…..

SFG reduces the chance that you miss any email. This service uses two "relays" which will spool (i.e. "save") your email messages in the event your mail server is off-line due to power failure, system email crash, routine maintenance, or any other reason. When your mail server is back online, it will automatically receive the spooled email. (Our service will spool your mail for up to five days.)

SFG Technical Description……

Email filtering is a process of monitoring incoming email and then taking the appropriate action to protect against Spam and viruses. Certain criteria are set to determine if an email is actually Spam. Each criterion has a certain weight or score. It also uses text analysis and several internet-based real-time blacklists. Tests and rules are executed on mail headers to determine and tag an email with Spam. Blocked Spam messages are logged into a database. For viruses, email messages and attachments are scanned and detected to delete and/or disinfect malicious programs.

SFG uses the following mechanisms to detect Spam…..

Header Analysis: Spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, fool you into thinking they've sent a valid mail, or fool you into thinking you must have subscribed at some stage. SFG tries to spot these.

Text Analysis: Spam mails often have a characteristic style, and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. NESS can identify these tactics.

Blacklists: SFG supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.org, ordb.org and many, many others.

Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative tracking-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of Spam messages. Since Spam typically operates by sending a nearly identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a Spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.

Bayesian Statistics: SFG applies Bayesian Statistics against known Spam and not-Spam messages to create new rules "on the fly".

DCC: Distributed Checksum Clearing house is a system of many clients and more than 120 servers that collect and count checksums related to several million mail messages per day. SFG uses a DCC check to see if the messages have been sent to a large number of users.

• All email passing through our SFG receives a "Spam score". Email below a certain score, typically, is not tagged as Spam and is delivered to the recipient intact. Email that typically scores between 6 and 10 is most probably Spam, but there is a very small chance that it might be real email.

• There are four actions that you can take on email that is caught by our filters as Spam.

• Modify Subject: Specify a string to insert at the beginning of the subject line, for easy viewing or spotting of Spam messages in your regular inbox.

• Save at SFG: Spam mail are saved on SFG server for 30 Days in quarantine option, u can recover any time up to day days.

• Reject: Just in case you want to be polite to the spammers, you can send them back a message saying that their email was rejected. You are no longer notified about the existence of the email, but the sender is, so they can contact you by another method. In most cases, instead of our mail server accepting the email message for delivery from the sender, we will reject the message. This results in a spammer getting the rejection message even if they are using a fake reply email address. You can customize the rejection message.

• Delete: This is the recommended option, and will just delete the email message. You aren't notified, and the sender isn't notified. It's just forgotten about. We don't let the Spam message waste any of our time.

• Email that scores off our limit-limit, typically over 10, is deleted, but other delivery options are available. The user never needs to be bothered by this "high scoring Spam".

• It is important to note that these spam scores and delivery options can be adjusted for an entire site, allowing the site administrator to determine what Spam is and what to do with it.