Better Spam Detection

Since spam isn't going away anytime soon, what is an email service provider to do? Image spam that gets through clogs mail servers with useless and dangerous emails, and then there still those spam-bots that seem to function like manure spreaders, just tossing more and more email out hoping to sprout one seed in a million.

So what is Message Partners doing about it. First, we've instituted Spam Traps. Populate your site or email posts with easily harvested addresses and configure our spam traps to block senders to these addresses. Since our spam traps use regular expression matching you can block whole classes of addresses, such as addresses that begin with numbers, or others that are popular in dictionary attacks. You should examine some of your maillogs to find addresses that are used in dictionary attacks or repetitive spam attacks. This alone will increase spam detection by a few percentage points.

Read more about Message Partners, and MPP improvements, right here.

Spam Must Be Stopped

I found the recent news from Message Labs highly disturbing that detailed the growing use of social engineering spam attacks, as in cyber-thieves learning as much about their spam targets as possible, even sending fake messages to the wives of CEO's, trying to find any weak spot in a companies security so as to gain access and do damage.

And with MPP 3.4, we have vastly improved on an already excellent email protection platform. Below is one way Message Partners' can help stop spam, phishing, and virus attacks:

You can now use MPP within Procmail scripts, so say you have on local delivery a Procmail script that says ‘scan all messages,’ this gives you access to all our scanning modules such as Cloudmark or Commtouch. So say you have Procmail script send us the messages, we scan it, send the result back to Promail, then Procmail takes the appropriate action.

This would save a lot of time for the customer because if they want to use Cloudmark in a Procmail script they would have to license the Cloudmark engine, do the development work, and that can very time consuming from a business perspective and a technical perspective.

To hear the all of our podcasts, or to read more about MPP, simply click here.

Simple but Powerful API Interface

With our newest release at Message Partners, MPP 3.4, we have designed an easy-to-use but powerful way to give service providers an API Interface. Here is how it works:

With MPP, You set all of the actions, including “on clean,” “on infection,” “on spam messages,” “on content violations,” every action to reject, then any script can send MPP a message via LMTP or SMTP and MPP will scan the message and then return the template response that you created from your rejection templates. Then the script will parse the response and do whatever it is instructed to do with the message.

The API interface is very simple to implement but very powerful. This gives any script access to all of the MPP scanning modules, as well as the MPP policy engine, which can make differentiated scanning decisions based on domain or email address, etc.

To hear the full podcast, simply click right here.