Mailsafe, our anti-spam solution
Invaded by spam? Free up and protect your mailboxes.
Some French companies have more than 90% spam among their emails. The majority of emails sent are simply advertisements. On the other hand, some emails can pose a threat to your business. Spam can be detrimental to employee productivity and monopolize bandwidth. In the most serious cases, spam can cause significant damage to your business. That’s why it’s so important to guard against these unwanted messages, especially if they’re malicious.
In just a few years, it has become mandatory for CIOs and IT managers to take action against spam. It is now necessary to put in place a genuine anti-spam policy for employees, to enable them to work in a secure environment. Several technologies, some simple, others more complex, are available to combat this scourge.
Why use anti-spam to secure your e-mail?
Installing an anti-spam solution is essential to protect your company’s messaging system from spam. Spammers can use sophisticated techniques to send malicious e-mails, such as phishing e-mails, which attempt to trick recipients into divulging sensitive information or downloading infected files. Unsolicited e-mails can also contain links to malicious websites or infected attachments that can compromise network security. By installing an anti-spam solution, unsolicited and dangerous e-mails can be filtered out before they reach users’ inboxes, reducing the risk of successful attacks and data loss.
Productivity protection: Spam can overload employees’ inboxes, forcing them to spend time sorting through unwanted messages. By installing an effective anti-spam solution, companies can protect employee productivity by reducing the time spent sorting through unnecessary messages.
Data protection: Spam can contain malicious links, viruses or malware that can damage company IT systems or steal sensitive data. By installing an anti-spam solution, the company can reduce the risk of these threats.
How does our anti-spam work?
Our anti-spam software detects, filters and prevents unwanted e-mails. Altospam’s Mailsafe uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform a behavioral analysis of the entire email. Your company benefits from innovative e-mail filtering techniques without any investment, as your e-mails are processed and analyzed in real time before final delivery to your mail server. What’s more, Altospam improves network performance and security by blocking spam before it reaches your server.
At the same time as guaranteeing a relevant service, Altospam fights against a drop in staff productivity and considerably reduces the legal risks for your company’s manager: using your mail server as a relay, obligation to protect employees against pornographic or offensive e-mails.
Our other protections included in Mailsafe
Analyse heuristique
Heuristic analysis is a set of rules represented in the form of regular expressions. It is used to search for e-mails whose headers and/or bodies correspond to very specific characteristics known to have a high probability of being spam. ALTOSPAM uses a customized rule base to identify both American and French spam.
Liste noire | Réputation IP
RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) or DNSBLs (Back List DNS) are lists of servers or networks known to assist, host, produce or retransmit spam, or provide a service that can be used as a medium for sending spam. Mailsafe uses the main community and commercial RBLs on the market.
Bases collaboratives de spams
These spam signature databases are used in the same way as virus signature databases. They are supplied by users of anti-spam solutions.
Enregistrement DNS
Checks the correlation between the source server’s IP address and its name via a reverse DNS query. Typically, dedicated mail servers have a fixed, bijective IP address with its associated domain name. This information can’t always be used with shared mail services, but is still interesting to include in the analysis.
Filtres bayesiens
Probabilistic e-mail filtering method based on the statistical distribution of keywords in e-mails. This type of algorithm adapts itself based on the analysis of known spam and non-spam e-mails.
Liste blanche
List of safe sites, hosts, domains or addresses. By default, very few hosts are considered safe, as their addresses could be spoofed by spammers. However, Altospam uses a self-learning whitelist system to speed up the processing time of senders already tested and considered safe. What’s more, Altospam lets you configure your own whitelist.
Historique des transactions
Previous transactions between the sender and recipient of a message influence the result of the analysis. People who are used to sending each other legitimate e-mails have no reason to send each other spam.
Adresse url
The purpose of analyzing URLs in the message body is to identify and filter the e-mail according to the desired action: the user clicking on a promotional link. This analysis is based on the detection of suspicious sites and suspicious URLs (numeric, badly formatted).
SPF et DKIM
Anti-spam techniques called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are designed to authenticate the sender of a message. SPF announces which mail servers are authorized to send e-mail for a given domain. DKIM signs e-mails sent by mail servers to ensure their integrity.
Validation du domaine émetteur
To be considered legitimate to send e-mail, a domain must comply with a certain number of standards. We carry out an analysis of the domain issuing the e-mails, in order to validate that the sending entity is indeed able to receive e-mails.
Analyse HTML et PDF
HTML code embedded in messages, as well as certain PDF files, may contain dangerous javascript elements. Mailsafe examines the HTML code and PDF files contained in an e-mail to identify any dangerous code or abnormal behavior.
Altospam examines the images and PDF files contained in an e-mail on various bases: number, type, size, format and dimensions, then compares these criteria with the characteristics of the images used by spammers.
Teergrubing
A technique used to significantly reduce the response speed of the SMTP server on certain connections considered suspicious. Teergrubing can be used to restrict the spam server.
Greylisting
Greylisting is an anti-spam technique that consists of temporarily rejecting a message by sending a temporary refusal code to the sending server. The sending server resends the e-mail after a few minutes. Most spam servers don’t bother! (Cf. Our article on Greylisting)
Test de turing
This technique, also known as challenge/response, consists of sending an e-mail requesting authentication to the sender of the message (via the reproduction of a displayed code) in order to verify its actual physical existence. Used on its own, this technology has a number of disadvantages (filtering work is transferred to the sender of the message, messages are systematically sent, often unsolicited, and false positives are generated). When integrated with other technologies and used judiciously at the end of the analysis, on the other hand, it frees up unresolved false positives.
Contrôle documents Office
Macros or VBA scripts in Office documents are currently one of the main vectors of virus infection. Using sandboxing, Mailsafe checks the activity of these scripts to establish their potential dangerousness, and then identifies and blocks dangerous attachments.
Why install an anti-spam solution?
Try our solutions
Free 15-day analysis: test Mailsafe and find out about attempted intrusions into your mailboxes.
Request a demo
Our email protection solution helps you prevent not only spam, but also phishing, ransomware, spear phishing, malware and virus threats. Book a slot with a cyber expert for a personalized demonstration.
Custom Quote
Our rates are tailored to your business and your size. Ask us for a personalized quote based on your company’s needs.
Our other features included in Mailsafe
Anti-phishing
Our machine learning algorithms perform behavioral, contextual and visual analyses of emails and urls to identify phishing attacks.
Anti-ransomware
Our algorithms and heuristic analyses examine both behavior and code to detect malware and ransomware lurking in emails, attachments and hosted files.
Anti- Spear-phishing
Our anomaly detection and semantic analysis algorithms detect spoofing attempts and malicious patterns in phishing emails.
Anti-malware | Anti-virus
Our solution integrates 6 antivirus tools to complement anti-spam filters, as well as 4 innovative technologies to detect unknown viruses.
Why install an anti-spam solution?
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What is spam?
Spam is misleading, unsolicited e-mail, usually sent en masse to many people within a company or organization. Spam can contain advertisements, sales offers, false information, malicious links, scams, phishing attempts, viruses or other types of malware. Spam can not only hamper employee productivity, but also pose a threat to corporate IT security, opening the door to more serious attacks.
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What are the different types of spam?
Spam can be divided into several categories, depending on its content and purpose. Here are some of the main categories of spam:
- Advertising spam: These are unwanted e-mails containing unsolicited advertising. They can promote various products, services, offers or websites.
- Phishing: Phishing e-mails are designed to trick recipients into divulging personal or confidential information, such as login details, passwords, credit card numbers and so on. Spammers often pose as legitimate entities, such as banks, financial institutions or well-known companies, in order to steal users’ sensitive data.
- Scams: Scam e-mails are spams that attempt to deceive recipients by offering them lucrative opportunities, inheritances, fictitious lotteries, requests for financial aid, etc. Their aim is to entice recipients to send money or share personal information.
- Malware: Some spam messages contain malicious files or links that can infect your computer or network with malicious software, such as viruses, ransomware, Trojans, etc. Spammers use these techniques to compromise your privacy. Spammers use these techniques to compromise system security and steal sensitive data.
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How can you protect your business email from spam?
To protect your business e-mail from spam, here are a few measures and best practices you can adopt:
- Use our Mailsafe e-mail filtering solution to filter out unwanted e-mails. Our anti-spam and anti-virus solution detects and blocks viruses and malware.
- Make your staff aware of good e-mail security practices. They need to be aware of the risks associated with spam and viruses, and know how to identify and deal with suspicious e-mails.
- Be careful with links and attachments: Avoid clicking on links or opening attachments from unknown or suspicious senders.
- Use strong, unique passwords. Avoid using easy-to-guess passwords, and enable two-factor authentication for an extra layer of security.
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What are the risks for my company if someone opens a spam message?
The risks to your company if a spam message is opened by an employee can include :
- Malware infection: Spam can contain viruses, ransomware or other types of malware that can infect your system and compromise the security of your data.
- Loss of confidential data: Some spam can be designed to steal sensitive information, such as login credentials, banking or corporate data, which can lead to financial losses or breaches of confidentiality.
- Phishing attacks: Some spam may be phishing attempts, where cybercriminals pose as legitimate entities to trick you into divulging personal or confidential information.
