News: Screening Platform Upgrade (May 2014)



13th May 2014
For any business today, the issue of Spam, Junk and Virus infected e-mails are never far from the agenda for all kinds of reasons - not least because the sheer volume of messages that are considered spam/junk vs those considered legitimate continues to be an alarming amount of the overall messages transmitted. By our own calculations and data, we see spam and virus infected e-mail accounting for almost 89% of all e-mail received at all.

It's one of the reasons that our Cloud Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam services are popular with customers - but we're always looking to make improvements, and today we've deployed some important changes which will reduce the administrative hassle of dealing with the undesireable mail as well as improve the detection levels.

So what's changed?

Firstly, when we launched our new Screening Platform in 2012, we made the decision that where we identified an e-mail as being virusor malware infected we would deliver the message, but without the infected parts (normally attachments). In its place, we inserted a message to let you know. This was because at the time, we were aware that occasionally Anti-Virus can "get it wrong" - so by delivering the message with the warning you would realise if the message should have been delivered.

Today customers tell us that in reality, so few messages (almost never) are incorrectly blocked that you simply don't want these messages - most customers consider them "spam" and find that they have to spend time reviewing & deleting them. Based on this, we have made a global change to our systems so that from now on, we'll NEVER deliver a message at all if we have identified it as being virus or malware infected. While this change doesn't mean the amount of spam or virus infected e-mail that exists has changed, it means you'll spend less time dealing with it administratively, reducing the hassle.

In addition, it means that if you have the "Spam Samples" or "ReDirection" services, virus infected e-mails won't be delivered to these accounts either - they'll be removed entirely and never delivered - as we're seeing a significant increase in the virus/malware infected messages this will help you review the remaining spam more efficiently.

But we haven't stopped there...

We've also introduced an upgrade to the Anti-Virus part of our Cloud Screening service - this change will increase the amount of e-mails we can reliably detect as having viruses or malware. As you might know, we already have a fast-updating scanning system but the reality is that virus developers and malware makers constanty adapt to try and circumvent - and we therefore need to keep improving our systems. Today's update means that we're now able to detect a larger number of virus infected mails - hitting the very most recent viruses with more accuracy. In our testing we have found it makes a marked difference particularly with some of the more recent trends we've seen.

The changes started rolling out to our live systems from around 15:30 on 12/05/14 - and within the next 24 hours will be effective for all customers with our Cloud Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam services.

If you haven't yet taken our Cloud Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam Services, it might be a good time to consider it - take a look at the links below, or call 01392 950 950 and speak to our team:

>> Find out more about our Cloud Screening Platform Services
>> Read the FAQs on our Support Knowledgebase about Cloud Screening Services

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