E-mail services

Spam Mail Scanning & Virus Protection

The MailControl platform has been designed from the outset to be extensible and highly scaleable providing an infrastructure capable of supporting millions of users.

MailControl services are delivered using a backbone of MailControl relays hosted at secure data centres across Europe. Each MailControl relay consists of clusters of secured servers with advanced load balancing capabilities that process, route and filter e-mail based on customer-defined policies.

The state of the art data centres housing the MailControl relays, provide a physically secure environment with fire suppression systems, redundant power systems and multiple Internet connections. The MailControl relays are also geographically disbursed across Europe to ensure that a major catastrophe effecting Internet availability within a country does not dramatically affect the service.

Service Activation

The MailControl service is a fully managed solution. This means there is no hardware or software installed onsite - customers just subscribe via a simple two-stage process:

• Stage One - Enrolment
• Stage Two - Mail Configuration

MailControl Anti-Virus is a fully managed service providing customers with complete protection from viruses and malicious content hidden inside Internet e-mail.

This means there is no hardware or software to purchase; you simply subscribe to the service. Once subscribed your Internet e-mail is re-routed through BlackSpider Technologies' MailControl data centres, where all inbound and outbound e-mail is scanned to ensure it is free from viruses.

If a virus is detected it is automatically quarantined to stop it infecting your network.

Management Features

• Online Customer Portal
• Management Dashboard
• Online management of quarantined e-mail
• Online policy management
• Online message tracking
• View all message logs and delivery reports

Anti-Virus Features

• 3 Commercial Anti-Virus Engines (Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky)
• Heuristic anti-virus engine to detect unknown viruses (Huntsman)
• Automatically quarantine infected e-mail

Content Filtering Features

• Block e-mails containing executables and script files (.exe, .pif, .scr, .bat)
• Block e-mails containing attachments, by attachment type (e.g. .tif, .jpg, .mp3)
• Block e-mails based on message size
• Defer e-mails based on message size for delivery at a later time
• Add annotations on all inbound and outbound e-mails
• Configure different annotations based on domain names

Notification Features

• Notify sender, recipient and administrator if a virus infected message is quarantined
• Notify sender, recipient and administrator if a message fails the content filtering rules
• Customer configurable notification messages
• Include in the notification a URL link to the portal with a view of the message and the reason it was quarantined.

MailControl Spam is a high-performance managed service that intelligently identifies spam and blocks its delivery.

Spam filtering presents a number of complex challenges due to the dynamic nature of junk e-mail. An effective spam filter must block the maximum unwanted e-mail, with minimal 'false positives' (valid e-mail, wrongly identified as spam).

MailControl Spam solves these problems by using an 'Adaptive Spam Filtering' engine which effectively learns what an organisation considers to be spam and adapts its filters accordingly.

This adaptive approach combined with the ability to set spam thresholds on a domain and per-user basis, ensure that MailControl Spam is the most effective spam filtering technology on the market today.

The whole scanning process takes less than one second. Once each message has been analysed by the different tests, the message receives an overall 'spam score'. The score is then compared against the spam threshold defined by the customer; mail scoring below the configured threshold is delivered as normal, whilst mail scoring above is quarantined as spam.

The rules used to assign a spam score include:

• Real Time Black Lists
• Lexical Analysis
• Bayesian Probability
• Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse
• Collaborative Spam Databases
• Spam Traps
• Trend Analysis