Our Corporate Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus service for corporate email gateways and domains. Maxim extends our standard Corporate Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus gateways by providing process intensive enhanced spam and virus detection which greatly reduces the volume to Spam to virtually zero.

The fight against Spam

The detection of spam is a continuos battle between the spammers and companies like us who are dedicated to eliminating it. As we evolve so do the spammers and we have to invest ever more complex and expensive technologies to counter them. Some of the technologies are outlined below: 

Standards: The internet is governed by a set of standards known as RFC's and the email delivery protocol is specified by RFC822 and RFC5321. The standards exist so that email can be interoperable between all platforms and servers, but spammers using email bots don't care about being compliant. By enforcing the standards and rejecting violations we can eliminate a percentage of spam, and of course legitimate email from organisations who can't configure their email system correctly. 

The blacklist: A number of worthy organisations like Spamhaus, SpamCop, Talos, etc are dedicated to maintaining lists of domains, hosts and subnets which are used to originate spam. Using these blacklists is an expensive but effective tool to eliminate a good percentage of spam at the first gate. Blacklists however are not truly realtime, and there is always a delay between a spammer launching a mass mailing and the blacklists listing it. 

Authentication: Several technologies exist to verify sender domains and hosts such as SPF & DKIM and these can serve (where used by the receiving server) to block spoofed spam which constitutes the vast majority of scams. For example, the HMRC who are under constant attack from scammers specify in their SPF records two hosts that are allowed to send email for @hmrc.gov.uk and of course the spammers cannot originate email from those addresses so SPF wins the day and any email coming from, say refund@hmrc.gov.uk that doesn't come from the two hosts listed in the SPF record are canned. This however all falls down then either the receiving server doesn't check, the sending organisation doesn't use it, or the sending organisation has been compromised.

DNS: The domain name system is that which coverts gen.net.uk to 212.140.242.10 and back again, and when you send email to someone @gen.net.uk DNS gives up the address of the mail server that is designated to receive that email, in this case farpoint.gen.net.uk. The RFC1124/1124 which form part of Internet Standard 1 specify clearly that every host on the internet should have forward and reverse DNS, that is gen.net.uk to 212.140.242.10 and 212.140.242.10 to gen.net.uk. So, when a host spamer.com connects from 212.140.242.50 to our mail server, we (a) check that 212.140.242.50 corresponds to spammer.com, that spammer.com has a valid MX record and that the host listed in the MX record actually exists on the internet. This is particularly hard for a spammer to forge and therefore this check eliminates a percentage of spam as well as a percentage of legitimate email from companies who don't know how to setup DNS correctly. 

Content Filtering: By far the most effective tool at eliminating spam which passes all the above tests is pattern matching. This involves looking and detecting elements in the body of an email and assigning a score to each detection. An example would be a HTML only email which scores 3 points, external links to pictures which scores 0.2 points each and so on. The more spammy the email the most points it will accumulate and once a threshold is reached the message is flagged as spam. Content filtering can make use of content lists which are maintained by third parties and provide known phrases and content to score. 

URI Blacklists: Many, in fact almost all spam email contains a link (or links) to websites to complete the process. These links (or URI's) are constantly changing but lists are maintained and inward email is checked for these URI's and excluded if found to contain one or more. This means that even if a spam flood is being originated from many hosts at once we can still trap it at the gateway based on content. 

Bayesian Probability Filtering: A gross simplification of this would be that email which is known to be spam can be 'learned' and that data used to identify 'similar' spam. The area of mathematics is complex and the techniques even more so, but the result is the same in that spam that looks like spam based on learned data can be flagged as such, usually by giving it a score, such as +10

When you combine all these techniques together you wind up with a spam detection system that, in our tests has an effective performance of 99.67% which is exceptional in the market. Spammy email is passed through with subject modifications for your gateway to filter (or not) as you require, or for individual users to filter using IMAP or similar rules. Full Diagnostic information is provided in email headers to permit more complex filtering based on spam score or infection type should this be required by your IT Team. 

Customers with GENX and GENZone and those with gateways and dedicated services can have this added to their email feed for a nominal charge. 

For more information or to request a free 30 day demo please contact us today. 

Electronic Mail brings with it a catalogue of issues that can make its operation costly and inefficient, from problems sending, problems receiving, relentless spam and viruses and performance issues. Our experts are able to solve pretty much all issues quickly and reliably in any of the following examples: 

Problems Sending

One of the problems with sending email is that receiving servers have varying degrees of anti-spam protection that can easily flag your messages incorrectly and prevent delivery. Some providers have well setup systems that rarely give issues whereas others have systems that are always giving issues and we've seen them all and know what does and doesn't work as well as having connections with most major providers to swiftly identify and resolve delivery issues. If your having problems getting your messages delivered then we can help. 

Problems Receiving

This one is sometimes harder to identify because there's rarely any tracking information available but then again the cause is often poorly configured systems and gateways which are relatively easy to resolve. We are able to contact the sender's and work with them to isolate the issue and then resolve the problems permanently. 

Endless Spam 

This one is easy to fix and generally requires some changes to server configurations as well as blacklisting and content filtering. In our experience the majority of spam that is causing concern will originate from small selection of sources which are easily identified and blocked. In the longer term we can work with you to block spam as it appears to keep mailboxes uncluttered and clean. 

Virus Infections

One problem we often encounter is blacklisting due to virus infection sending spam from the customers premises, this is surprisingly common and can be hard to track down because some infections are smart and hide well. We already have a corporate antivirus team and their expertise can be leveraged to identify and clean any virus infection that's causing unwanted blacklisting and general damage. 

Risk Management

One potential for harm that is rarely considered is the real risk of email from your employees. We are frequently contacted to 'stop' an email sent by an employee either by accident or as a deliberate malicious act and the truth is we can't. Considering the potential damage that employees can do and mitigating that damage should be something that all companies do by default. When we look at organisations we often find that more than 80% of employees don't actually need to be able to email outside of the company, and by simply restricting these employees to company only email we can greatly reduce the risk of accidental or deliberate detrimental behaviour. For the remaining employees, restricting what they can send can also help prevent accidental or deliberate data loss via email. 

Track and Trace

Many email systems do not keep accurate logging or tracking of email's sent and received and yet in our experience email is a regular source of cost and harm that can then never be identified after the fact. Being able to track email's sent and received and be able to monitor activity should be a prerequisite. We have a number of systems to store, archive and analyse email traffic to ensure there's always an answer available for any suspicion. 

Marketing

As anti-spam protection progresses more and more of your marketing email's are going to be rejected silently and never reach your recipients. This can be a huge problem especially when conventional 'tracking' techniques such as embedded images are now generally defeated by email client software. Maximising the reach of your email marketing activity requires both careful crafting of the email AND reliable distribution both of which we can help with. We manage email marketing operations for many organisations and are able to reliably indicate delivery probability together with list management of bad addresses which can also result in unwanted blacklisting.

Contact us today for pricing and a free consultation

In this world of information overload being able to accurately focus on email's that matter whilst ignoring those which don't is invaluable and of course GEN has a service specifically for this. We call this our GENX Gateway Account which has an unusual configuration rarely seen. In a normal email configuration you would have one or more mailboxes allocated to a domain name, e.g. bob@domain.com, anny@domain.com and so on. This is great and each user has their own mailbox to manage indivudually.

GENX Gateway is radically different, and in this configuration is does not matter what is put before the @domain.com, its all accepted and lands in the same mailbox. That's one mailbox receiving ALL the email no matter what mailbox is used and we call the part before the @ the pseudo mailbox. In our example let's assume that we've setup a GENX Gateway account on domain.net and we've given this a destination mailbox of domain@genzone.net. From this point onwards, email sent to bob@domain.net, bill@domain.net, fluffysheep@domain.net will all wind up in domain@genzone.net with their headers (the from and to) intact. 

Some of you may now be thinking what use is that?, and its probabily not immediately clear so let's work an example scenario... 

Our mail domain is domain.net, and the GENX Gateway account is domain@genzone.net. 

• We sign-up for Facebook and we give them facebook@domain.net
• We sign-up for Twitter and give them twitter@domain.net
• We sign-up for Linked and give them linkedin@domain.net
• We sign-up for Dodgy website and give them dodgy1@domain.net
• We sign-up for a lead generation website and give them leads@domain.net

All these email's arrive in domain@genzone.net without any issues and their headers will be unaltered. Now we can work some magic...

• We create some folders in our mailbox and call them Facebook, Twiter, Linkedin, dodgy1 and leads and Crap.  
• We then setup some Rules which say "IF receipient is facebook@domain.net THEN MOVE TO FOLDER Facebook". We repeat this rule for each of Twitter, Linkedin, dodgy1 and Leads. 
• We add one more Rule which says "MOVE TO FOLDER Crap". 

Because Rules are executed in order, any email from Facebook will but put in the Facebook folder and any email from Twitter will be put in the Twitter folder, any email not already put into folders will be put in the Crap folder. 

This by itself can of course be replicated using Aliases or setting up rules based on domain, but the real benefit is three fold: 

Firstly, you don't need to setup anything beforehand, you can just use any mailbox name you wish at any time. If you happen upon a website that needs you to sign up, and let's face it most do, then you can just make up a new mailbox on the spot without having to setup an alias. This is amazingly flexible. 

Secondly, because your using the TO address to route instead of the FROM address then your folder rules are ALWAYS correct no matter what FROM address they use. 

Finally, We all know websites will sell your data as soon as look at it, and by using a GENX Gateway account you get to see WHO is sending email to your dodgy1@domain.net pseudo mailbox and if its not dodgy1 then they've sold you email address to someone else. 

A couple of Bonus Features

I'm sure most people have used eBay at some point in their life, and whilst its a great way to frit away your hard earned cash its also a spam generation engine because everytime you buy something the seller receives your full email address and even though its against eBay rules a good percentage will add your email address to their mailing lists and start spamming you. If you'd setup "ebay@domain.net to MOVE TO FOLDER ebay" and you start receving spam to ebay@domain.net from ally@muppets.com then you'll want to stop it. In a 'Normal' email account you would need to setup another rule to say if email from ally@muppets.com then delete, but this can and does become tiresom if you use ebay often. With a GENX Gateay Account its as simple as changing your email registered with eBay to ebay1@domain.net, update your eBay rule to MOVE ebay1@domain.net instead of ebay@domain.net into your eBay folder and you've single handedly left all the eBay seller spam behind. 

Tracking Data Breaches is almost impossile with a normal email account, but with a GENX Gateway account its very easy to identify who has sold or leaked your email account because each website has its own pseudo mailbox name. If you find you used barclays@domain.net for your internet banking and you start receiving email's to that from a travel company then its clear that one of two things has happened - Either Barcays SOLD your email address to some travel company which is something you should certainly take up with ICO, OR  Barcays have had a data breach and your email address was leaked which again you should take up with ICO. When you've been using a GENX Gateway account for a few years as I have you really start to see its value in keeping your email's spam free and managed with precision.