The Spam Problem
Spam is a serious email problem that is only getting worse. Leading industry analysts collectively agree that Spam proliferation is still on the increase. Spam currently accounts for approximately 80% of corporate email (this number varies regionally), but is predicted to account for 90% of email by 2008.
| MailMarshal regularly achieves a spam catch rate of over 99 percent. |
Marshal’s own research into spam has indicated that spam costs 4 cents (US) per message on average. On its own, that doesn’t sound like a lot but the spam issue is one of overwhelming numbers. One customer has reported that MailMarshal is capturing over 200,000 Spam messages a day. That’s a saving of US$8,000 per day in bandwidth and time.
Spam Is A Moving Target
Spam senders have a simple business model: they use other people's resources as much as possible. With very low operating costs, it only takes a few responses for a campaign to turn a profit. As spam detection percentages improve, spammers are constantly employing new technologies to get the message through, including:
- "Bot nets" of remote PCs infected by viruses and turned into Spam senders, delivering increased volume
- Messages using images to deliver a text, bypassing lexical analysis
- Messages using multiple images
- Subtle differences in messages, to avoid signature based detection
Will Legislation Solve the Spam Problem?
In October 2004, agencies from 27 countries convened to attend the first international forum dedicated solely to addressing spam issues. Their aim was to improve cross-border collaboration in the fight against spam. Topics included law enforcement strategies, sharing of information and the reduction of cross-border barriers in battling spam.
European and Asian countries attending a similar conference in February 2005 pledged to work together and to promote international efforts in the battle against spam. A key attendee at this conference was China, which is estimated to be the source of more than 68 percent of spam globally.
Within the European Union itself, 13 member states have agreed to work together in tackling the spam originating from within the selected countries. Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom have ratified a similar agreement.
In Germany a cross-section of trade organizations have formed an alliance in the battle against spam at a national level.
A main intention of this increased collaborative activity is to use legislation to hit back at spammers. Several countries have introduced laws and regulations designed to give law enforcement a means of penalizing serious abusers. For example, the United States has introduced the CAN-SPAM Act, the European Union has the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive and Germany has the Tele-services Act.
Spam Volume Continues To Rise
Officials have brought several high-profile cases against spammers, with some resulting in successful prosecutions. However, the international cooperation and legislation seem to have little impact on combating spam. Despite the ongoing efforts, there continue to be year-on-year increases in spam originating from Europe, in particular France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. In fact, Europe has become a greater source of spam than the United States. Worldwide spam trends still rise, with a 94 percent increase in February 2005, compared to the same month in 2004.
Spam has also gone beyond being a major source of irritation in your inbox. Increasingly, spam is of an illegal nature. Offenders now deploy viruses and hacking methods to gain control of zombie servers and assist in spam delivery. Phish-type spam lures unwitting victims into divulging personal information to allow the attacker to steal their identity and/or gain access to their bank accounts.
Marshal's Anti-Spam Success Story
MailMarshal SMTP is an industry-leading anti-spam solution. In a recommended configuration, MailMarshal regularly achieves a spam catch rate of over 99 percent with a fractional percentage of false positives. (Results vary due to the regional nature of spam.) MailMarshal combines the best of automatic updating and local configuration approaches, to customize your response to spam.
The key to the success of MailMarshal lies in identifying spam at the gateway, before it enters the organization. MailMarshal applies a multi-tiered approach to anti-spam, employing an array of different methods to identify spam and minimize false positives.
These methods include:
SpamCensor
Marshal's proprietary heuristic anti-spam engine, trained to identify spam based on thousands of characteristic indicators
Dynamic updates to SpamCensor
Marshal is constantly evolving its anti-spam technology and regularly updates MailMarshal with the latest tools developed by Marshal’s security experts
SpamCensor Zero Day
Marshal provides rapid response updates to combat specific threats
RBL databases
MailMarshal references real-time blacklists of known spam sources and assesses messages that have passed through known spam gateways.
URLCensor
MailMarshal uses DNS Blacklist technology to identify messages with suspicious URLs that link to likely spam sources
Whitelisting and blacklisting (gateway and user definable)
Users can identify individual email addresses or domains that are either known spammers or authorized safe email senders
Challenge Response
Users can automatically gather outbound email addresses and challenge any unapproved inbound email addresses
SQM (Spam Quarantine Management)
MailMarshal empowers end users to manage their spam via an individualized Internet portal. End users can review spam that has been blocked for them, release messages that they wish to receive, add safe senders and blacklists and delegate spam management to other users
