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SPAM and Virus Filtering

SPAM and Virus Filtering Solutions

Our Spam filtering service has been designed with time, accuracy and simplicity as the key critical elements. From the second Spam filtering is enabled on your account, you can expect upwards of 98% of junk mail eradicated from your Inbox.

How It Works

With its self learning Bayesian database and point scoring engine, coupled with our proactive monitoring of new techniques employed by Spammers - thus ensuring new Spam is filtered without risking an increase to geninue (ham) mail. Such is the power and accuracy of the filter that the likelihood of incorrectly identifying a message as spam is negligible and makes it nigh on impossible for spammers and virus writers to craft their messages to bypass the filters.

Clustered Reliable Servers

Our multiple spam filtering machines are clustered and fully support the ETRN extension, meaning we can hold your mail should your own server go down or become unavailable. This entire solution can instantly provide you with the ultimate in spam and virus filtering protection.


Unlimited Mailboxes - Forget Per User Licensing!

Our spam filtering is installed on a per hosting account basis. You can map multiple domain names to one hosting account which will display the same website and share the same email facilities. This also applies to spam filtering, thus all you pay is £20+VAT per annum to have all your email scanned for spam and viruses.

Move SPAM

Move SPAM

Spam suspected messages can be moved to a mailbox within your account that can then be viewed or verified using webmail or any standard POP3 mail client.
 
Quarantine SPAM

Quarantine SPAM

The quarantine feature stores messages considered junk in a folder labelled as 'Spam' that can be viewed through our powerful web based webmail application. This allows you to check through the messages before deletion, but without having to download them to your local computer. Ideal for multi recipient based domains allowing each user to check their own Spam.
 
Mark SPAM

Mark as SPAM

Each suspected spam message can have its subject prefixed with a given word; the default being SPAM:. Thus, allowing you to download the messages locally and filter in your own mail client.
 
Delete SPAM

Delete SPAM

Use our systems to ensure no spam is ever sent to you. Our systems are upwards of 98% accurate in terms of identifying spam and as such you can have the confidence that only legitimate email will be routed to your mailbox. This is the default action for all virus bourne emails.
 

Advanced Settings

As well as the above listed features, the filter will add headers and attach a full and detailed report to your message detailing the reasons why spam messages have been considered as such with the points awarded based on the checks performed. Further to this, you have the ability to tailor the package to suit your requirements further, creating the perfect filtering solution.
 
Tolerence Levels

Tolerance Levels

Focusing on a self evolving point scoring system, all email is scanned and checked by thousands of different rules to check its validity. The higher the score, the more likely it is spam. The tolerance scale allows you to either increase or decrease the points required by our filter for a message to be considered as Spam.
 
Black Lists

Black Lists

Email addresses and domains in your black list will always be considered as SPAM regardless of their content.
 
White Lists

White Lists

Email addresses and domains in your white list will always be passed through the SPAM filtering checks regardless of their content.
 
SPAM Reports

SPAM Reports

When the filter identifies a message as junk, it makes a report indicating why the message was targeted as such. This can prove interesting as to why some emails mail have been deemed to be spam in the first place.
 
SPAM Reports

SPAM Statistics

To show you how our spam filter has benefited you we provide you with graphical statistics. These are detailed statistics which are provided on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They include not just a graph shown details of the filtering, but which checks caught the highest amount of spam bourne email.

 

Purchase

By signing up to our reseller service you can automatically take advantage of our unique SPAM Filtering services. Note that virus scanning and removal facilities are included by default at no extra charge on all shared and reseller hosting accounts.

Annual Subscription [Per Account] £20.00

SPAM and Virus Filtering Solutions for External Domains

Our SPAM + Virusfiltering to include the ability to filter email hosted externally. An example of which is mail routed to a customer's Microsoft Exchange, Dedicated server or a domain hosted by a third party ISP. It has been designed with time, accuracy and simplicity as the key critical elements. From the second Spam filtering is enabled on your account, you can expect upwards of 98% of junk mail eradicated from your Inbox. The cost for this is only £30+VAT per annum per domain name. There are NO per user subscription costs regardless of the number of individual email addresses you associate to a single instance.

Move SPAM

Move SPAM

Spam suspected messages can be moved to a specified mailbox address. There suspected messages can be viewed checked prior to removal.

 
Mark SPAM

Mark as SPAM

Each suspected spam message can have its subject prefixed with a given word; the default being SPAM:. Thus, allowing you to download the messages locally and filter in your own mail client.
 
Delete SPAM

Delete SPAM

Use our systems to ensure no spam is ever sent to you. Our systems are upwards of 98% accurate in terms of identifying spam and as such you can have the confidence that only legitimate email will be routed to your mailbox. This is the default action for all virus bourne emails.
 

Advanced Settings

As well as the above listed features, the filter will add headers and attach a full and detailed report to your message detailing the reasons why spam messages have been considered as such with the points awarded based on the checks performed. Further to this, you have the ability to tailor the package to suit your requirements further, creating the perfect filtering solution.
 
Automatic Mail Backup Facility

Mail Backup Facilities

Should your external mail server fail then our servers will automatically, and for free, queue your email for upto 7 days. To de-queue we provide you a really simply request facility via the control panel which will allow you to start the de-queuing process.

 
Tolerence Levels

Tolerance Levels

Focusing on a self evolving point scoring system, all email is scanned and checked by thousands of different rules to check its validity. The higher the score, the more likely it is spam. The tolerance scale allows you to either increase or decrease the points required by our filter for a message to be considered as Spam.

*NEW* Our control panel now allows you to set the number of black list checks. The more checks that are completed the less likely you will receive spam messages. Three settings are available - basic (set by default), intermediate, and advanced.

 
Black Lists

Black Lists

Email addresses and domains in your black list will always be considered as SPAM regardless of their content.
 
White Lists

White Lists

Email addresses and domains in your white list will always be passed through the SPAM filtering checks regardless of their content.
 
SPAM Reports

SPAM Reports

When the filter identifies a message as junk, it makes a report indicating why the message was targeted as such. This can prove interesting as to why some emails mail have been deemed to be spam in the first place.
 
SPAM Reports

SPAM Statistics

To show you how our spam filter has benefited you we provide you with graphical statistics. These are detailed statistics which are provided on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They include not just a graph shown details of the filtering, but which checks caught the highest amount of spam bourne email.

 

Purchase

By signing up to our reseller service you can automatically take advantage of our unique SPAM and Virus Filtering services. A 14 day free trial is available on every spam filter installation setup.

Annual Subscription [Per Domain] £30.00

SPAM and Virus Filtering Control Panel

The SPAM + Virus Filtering is available in two guises, one for the the domains which you control and host via your reseller control panel, and the other for accounts which may be hosted elsewhere. We have designed our control panel interface to be as simple and intuitive as possible. It can provide those customers who simply want to eradicate SPAM and Viruses with the minimum setup and maintainence time, but also fulfill the needs of those who like to tweak settings to match their personal preferences, or who are simply fascinated how the filter can accurately catch unwanted email.

Standard SPAM Filtering

SPAM Filtering Overview
SPAM Filtering Settings
SPAM Filtering Statistics

External SPAM Filtering

External SPAM Filtering Overview
External SPAM Filtering Settings
  
 

Filtering Techniques

Our Spam + Virus Filtering product is a result of several man hours of testing, configuration, research and development by our in house staff allowing to use your email without hindrance from junk and virus bourne mail, however formed and sent to you.

SPAM Filter Cluster

The Filter works on a separate and extremely powerful mail server cluster to our regular POP3 mail delivery machines; preventing a deluge of spam from impacting on normal mail delivery. Each email is scanned and checked against thousands of different rules to determine the likelihood of it being junk or genuine mail.

CLICK ON THE DIAGRAM OPPOSITE FOR A LARGER IMAGE

ICUK Spam Filtering Cluster Design

Filtering Checks

Heuristics Engine
Thousands of tests check the message headers and content for tell tale signs of spam. The originating mail server and senders address are verified to prevent spoofing. We proactively monitor and adapt the tests used by by the filter to any new techniques the spammers employ.

Bayesian Probability Algorithms
Bayesian algorithms are used to build up a database of the characteristics of unwanted mail and the characteristics of legitimate mail. The database can then be consulted to determine the likelihood of any particular message being spam. Furthermore, through continually analysing messages the database is actively updated as the nature of spam changes, creating a form of self evolving intelligence.

Checksum Databases
Any message has a unique checksum, as users report unsolicited mail messages, their checksums are added to a database. Several collaborative checksum databases are consulted to ascertain whether the message concerned matches one previously identified as spam by another Internet user.

Real Time Blackhole Lists
Several real time blackhole lists (RBLs) are maintained on the Internet which catalog known sources of spam. The Spam filter checks for the presence of the originating mail servers in any of these lists.

Vipul's Razor
As well as the standard networking tests, the new version will utilise a "Razor client" to link in with Vipul's Razor network. This technology has not been used before now due to the large overhead that is involved in its use.

The following summary of Vipul's Razor, taken directly from the author, explains the ins and outs of the protocol:

Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomised signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.

Pyzor
Pyzor is a Python implementation of Razor, which runs much in the same way but via an alternative network. Consulting both networks greatly improves the filter's capability to catch otherwise low scoring messages.

OCR
The introduction of Optical Character Recognition scanning techniques is the latest addition that we are most excited about. With the latest trend of spam messages bestowing sole image files, previous attempts at filtering them have largely been ineffective and has affected many spam filtering providers.

With this new method, as well as the body and headers of messages being scanned for common spam words and phrases, any attached or inline images are also scanned using OCR functions.

Whilst some images are crafted in such a way that they simply cannot be recognised by OCR, we have seen that over 75% of messages containing spam images are detected.

Additional Rules
As well as the above new methods, new filtering rules have been added alongside the existing rules to tackle common spam themes such as:

* Adult orientated
* Message obfuscation
* Stock/finance related
* Spoofed legitimate emails (including phishing techniques)
* OEM software
* Drug and performance related medicines

Virus Scanner
Virus definitions are checked for and updated automatically ensuring that you are protected against threats as they emerge. The virus scanner is capable of detecting all known virus types, including polymorphic or self-encrypting viruses, it is even capable of scanning the contents of compressed archives such as zip and rar files ensuring that no virus bearing email can make it to your inbox.

Detailed Reports
Each message scanned and found to be spam can include a detailed text attachment explaining why the message was considered as such, including the points awarded to each rule that was matched and the total points scored on the email.

Live Filtering Statistics

Below is a summary graph showing in real time the level of SPAM and Viruses which are being filtered by our system. It is not a summary of our overall email capacity, just for those customers who have opted to use our very own in-house SPAM Filtering. If you were in any doubt of its effectiveness we hope this gives you an indication as to just how powerful it can be. Not only that but all accounts can gain access to a free 14 day trial so they can see for themselves.

 

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