Simply put, spam is unsolicited e-mail. They are usually advertisements, but sometimes they are scams, attempting to entice a person to divulge personal information (such as bank account numbers).
How
Spam typically starts to show up when you register your e-mail address on a website or give it to a person with bad intentions. It is also possible that you end up on spammers’ lists after after they generate mass searches.
Once your address is on a spammer’s list, your e-mailbox will fall prey to spam–a few at first, then slowly ever more, until you or your mailbox is overwhelmed.
Risks
The main risk of not confronting a spam problem is the saturation of your e-mailbox. Another problem is the huge loss of time incurred by sorting out the legitimate messages hidden among the spam. The risks might seem small–or even inexistent–when your e-mail address has not yet made its way onto spammers’ lists. But it will happen sooner or later to almost everyone, and the consequences are irreversible.
In the case of a company, the costs incurred by spamming are often high, in terms of lost bandwidth, hard drive storage, and above all else, in human resources.
Solution
MailCleaner.net offers different levels of protection against spamming:
- Preventive protection: Detection and blocking of massive address search attacks, first-level blocking of known spammers, etc.
- Shared detection: Immediate blocking of spam messages recognized by the community, knowledge sharing with other antispam systems, etc.
- Analysis: Syntactic and form analysis of messages according to routinely updated criteria. MailCleaner.net uses a number of different criteria modules internally, but also reputable open source modules, such as SpamAssassin, which guarantee that MailCleaner.net maintains optimal levels of spam recognition and reaction. The filtering rules are routinely adapted to fit the ever-changing strategies of spammers.