What’s New in PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway v2.4

New Filtering Technology

The best anti-spam solutions are ones that have a high spam detection accuracy rate without losing legitimate messages. Solutions that use multiple layers of filtering technology can achieve this high level of protection from harmful spam and viruses. PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway now offers additional layers of protection with reputation filtering, advanced web-based content filtering, and Clam AntiVirus.

Most email filters cannot detect spam messages that contain few words with a link to a website. The goal of the spammer is to create a message that looks legitimate so it will circumvent the filter, while enticing users to click on the link. Clicking on the link will bring you to a website containing the real spam. These websites can be dangerous to visit. They contain many different threats including:

• Phishing scams where the website masquerades as a legitimate site in order to get visitors’ banking or credit card information.
• Offensive images which a visitor did not intend to view
• Spyware, which is a program installed on visitors’ systems without their consent for the purpose of gathering personal information for illicit purposes.

Because many email-filtering solutions identify spam using some type of text analysis (such as heuristic or Bayesian), these spam messages often go undetected by the email filters. PreciseMail’s reputation filter is effective at combating this type of spam.

Process Software actively analyzes several million web sites for over 20 indicators that a site is being used by spammers and phishers. Sites are also analyzed for adult content. Each analyzed website is given a reputation score, based on how “bad” it is. PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway obtains reputation scores for URLs contained in incoming email messages, and uses the reputation data to help determine if a message is spam.

Users and administrators can use the graphical web interface to create their own message filtering rules that can allow, block, tag, or quarantine a message based on any part of the message body or headers (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Clam AntiVirus

PreciseMail Anti-Spam Gateway’s web administration interface makes it easy to enable Clam Anti-Virus, the leading open-source anti-virus software (see Figure 2). According to research published on www.clamAV.net, Clam AntiVirus has over 6 million users worldwide and a good reputation for being updated frequently. Process Software provides automatic updates of new virus definition files from Clam AntiVirus along with PreciseMail Anti-Spam filter updates. Clam AntiVirus is supported on the Linux and UNIX platforms in the standalone SMTP proxy configuration.

Figure 2

User Interface Enhancements

The following user web interface options have been added:

• Supports for allowing users to disable acknowledgement emails from the PreciseMail email interface.
• Clicking on navigation icons on the allow/block list pages, results in a warning popup if you have changed the lists but have not saved (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

• Modified preference page navigation (see Figure 4)

Figure 4

Performance improvements

• The rules can be compiled to improve the performance for OpenVMS deployments.
• User quarantine interface performance enhancements

Other Enhancements

• Administrators can create system wide allow/block lists using the web interface.
• Administrators can customize any aspect of the email quarantine notification that is sent to users.
• A user action report has been added to the administrator’s web interface (see Figure 5)

Figure 5