Losing Legitimate Messages When Implementing an Anti-Spam Solution Can Result in a More Serious Problem of Lost Business

Process Software Advises How to Achieve Zero Loss of Legitimate Messages

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (February 14, 2005) – Process Software, a Platinum Equity company that is a premier supplier of communications software solutions to mission-critical environments, today describes techniques used by some leading anti-spam solutions including their own PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, to minimize or even eliminate false positives. A false positive is a legitimate message that has been incorrectly identified as spam by an anti-spam filtering solution. “Organizations consider legitimate messages incorrectly identified as spam a much larger problem than the occasional spam message that manages to sneak by the filter”, said Brian P. McDonald, president and chief executive officer for Process Software. “There are several reasons why an anti-spam filter might think a legitimate message is spam, the most common being that the message has several spam-like qualities. Newsletters, promotions from e-commerce sites, and joke lists all contain content that is virtually identical to spam.” Leading anti-spam filters, such as PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, have features to accommodate these type of messages from being filtered inadvertently while maintaining a high spam detection catch rate.” As stated in a recent NetworkWorld review, Spam in the Wild, The Sequel, “PreciseMail offers dozens of adjustments that can be used to drop the false positive rate while keeping the spam catch rate at 98-99%.

The top techniques Process Software recommends spam filters should support are:

The first line of defense against a message being improperly marked as spam is an allowlist (alternately known as a whitelist). An allowlist lets messages that meet a certain criteria, such as being sent from a particular address, domain or containing a certain word in the Subject line, pass through the anti-spam filter without being identified as spam. These allowlisted messages are always delivered to the recipient, regardless of their content. For example, users would add newsletters, friends, business associates, and reservation confirmations to an allowlist. PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway allow email end users to create their own allowlist entries via their personal web-based spam management page. Administrators can implement system-wide allowlists.

Several anti-spam filters, including PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, incorporate an artificial intelligence engine based on Bayesian text filtering. A Bayesian engine “learns” the difference between spam and legitimate messages sent to an organization’s site. A properly trained Bayesian engine can help prevent the anti-spam solution from misclassifying legitimate messages that contain some objectionable content as spam.

Many anti-spam filtering solutions, including PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, assign every message they filter a numerical score. The higher the score, the more likely it is that a message is spam. Both the system administrator and end users can decide how high a message has to score before a certain action is taken. Any number of actions may be taken, depending on the message score including tagging the message as spam in the Subject line, quarantining the message, or discarding the message. Anti-spam solutions should let the system administrator change the numerical thresholds at which certain actions occur to site-appropriate values. In addition, the system administrator should be able to give end users the option to set their own personal spam-filtering thresholds.

Heuristic filtering engines use a large set of rules to look for features of an email message. Some features indicate that a message may be spam, while other features indicate that a message probably is not spam. By carefully weighing the combination of features found in a message, the heuristic engine determines if the message is spam or not. One set of rules often does not effectively filter spam for every site. A flexible anti-spam filter, like PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, gives system administrators the ability to add, modify, delete, and change the weights of rules inside its heuristic filtering engine.

Quarantine Release

The last line of defense against the loss of legitimate email messages is the quarantine area of an anti-spam solution. Messages that the filter believes are most likely spam are removed from a site’s mail stream and quarantined. Usually, this means that the messages are written out to a special area of a disk on the system that the anti-spam solution is running on. Each user can get a listing of messages in their quarantined area, and choose to release messages that should not have been quarantined. Messages that are released are delivered normally to the user.

Ideally, users should check their quarantine every day or so to make sure legitimate messages have not been accidentally classified as spam. Some anti-spam solutions, including PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway, send automated mailings to each user who has new quarantined messages to remind them to check their personal quarantine area. These mailings are only sent a few times a day to prevent them from becoming an annoying distraction. Users can preview the contents of quarantined messages and release accidentally quarantined messages from inside the notification email.

Process Software has been a premier supplier of communications software solutions to mission critical environments for twenty years. We were early innovators of email software and anti-spam technology. Process Software has a proven track record of success with thousands of customers, including many Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 companies.

Platinum Equity (www.platinumequity.com) is a global M&A&O® firm specialized in the merger, acquisition and operation of mission-critical services and solutions companies. Since its founding in 1995, Platinum Equity has acquired more than 50 businesses and built a portfolio of companies with nearly 40,000 employees and more than 600,000 customer sites. With revenue approaching $8 billion, Platinum Equity in 2004 was named the 32nd largest private company in the United States by Forbes magazine.

Contact:
Lauren Maschio
Process Software
Director of Marketing
(508) 626-7525
maschio@process.com