Spam in general can be understood as unsolicited email received in large volume. These emails eat up productive time of user/employees of the organization and very important to control it before delivering to users’ mail boxes. A large percentage of total emails received at organization’s gateway is spam which may create various types of security issues like identity theft, virus, malicious code, etc.
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To overcome this problem there are various anti-spam software provided either individual tool or combined in entire security suite of software. This is also true that simply deploying tool/software one time is not sufficient while it is important to upgrade it regularly and define correct polices along with continuous enhancement/upgrade in policies defined for keywords filters, spam protection rules, mail security rules, define/update black & white list of sender’s email/domain. Further protected mechanism can be adopted by the organization to subscribe cloud based mail hosting and subscribe for clean email where cloud service provider can deploy and manage highly effective anti-spam tools in much larger way being big and exclusive service provider and have fleet of administrator to monitor and update it in much responsive manner.
Type of organizations needing Anti-spam solution
Anti-Spam solution is needed by all the organizations who manages/maintains email servers environment in-house either fully managed or partial managed. In fact for end point (employees workstations) security protection perspective it is required to have end point security tool covering anti-spam considering end-users are not only using their company’s specific domain based emails but also using personal external provider emails access which may also contains spam.
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Key drivers for adoption
- Protecting unsolicited emails
- Protecting virus and malicious code which may cause to damage data.
- Productivity improvement by saving time for not getting unsolicited emails with the help of anti-spam tool/policies.
Top technology trends for the Anti-Spam Security
- Constantly updating of spam database for latest spam by the anti-spam tools provider companies and the same to be updated at customer place those who are using their anti-spam tool.
- Anti-spam tool developer Company’s research lab may be working on incorporating algorithm or mechanism which do not block genuine mail and block only spam mails (based on false positive or false negative rules) so that it does not hamper organization/user productivity and make anti-spam tool more intelligent. Going forward simply detecting spam based on keywords may not be sufficient because a mail can’t be considered as spam just by containing keyword listed in filter list while there are other aspects like invalid email id or blacklisted domain, etc. to declare spam mail. I am sure that anti-spam tool developer companies may be trying to enhance algorithm which covers these aspects and tool become more sophisticated to fight spam intelligently.
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- There are many popular techniques used to protect spam and configured with the help of anti-spam tools in the organization. As per my understanding, following is list of most popular techniques used to protect spam. In future, technology trend shall be further strengthening rules/algorithm under these techniques alongwith developing new techniques by security software provider companies.
- List of DNS blacklisted sites
- Checking words: false positives
- Checksum based filtering
- Country based filtering
- Enforcing RFC standards
- Greylisting (temporary rejection of incoming messages)
- HELO/EHLO checking
- Outbound spam protection
- Pattern detection
- Rule/policy based filtering also termed as content filtering
- Bayesian or statistical content filtering
- By Rajeev Mittal, Head IT/IS, Piaggio Vehicles
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