News: Screening Platform Upgrades

8th January 2013
As many of our customers tell us, Spam is a big headache for any small business, and in recent months demand for our Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam Services have continued to increase - as customers take smartphones and tablet devices to use with mobile e-mail more, dealing with the incoming stream of junk mail becomes more and more desirable.

We've been working to improve our Screening Platform for some time with a view to ensuring the system is more accurate and offers more flexibility to you so you can control how you manage Spam.

So what's changing?

The system used for your Screening Platform has been rebuilt from scratch, and as part of that is now more accurately described as the "Cloud Screening Platform". It still provides Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam scanning but with significantly improved detection.

- A New Scanning Engine

The new scanning engine uses up to date technology to decide what is "junk" vs what is "legitimate". It's not actually too easy to identify spam - there's no single way to identify what is undesirable vs a perfectly legitimate and worthwhile message. As a result Anti-Spam systems use complex rules and analysis to make those decisions. Our new platform combines this with access to over 2 billion messages a day of intelligence that analyse the trend of messages across the globe. That means new spam outbreaks can rapidly become known to the systems and blocked accordingly. This results in the ability to be up to 97% accurate in detections. It's also significantly faster than the current system.

- Improved Spam Handling and ReDirection

Our existing platform has always offered the capability to have messages identified as "spam" to be either "deleted" (which we don't recommend!) or re-directed to a "Spam Samples" account - a special "holding pen" for junk. This works well for many of our customers, but we know sometimes you want our system to simply work out what's junk, then let you receive it to folders such as Outlook's "Junk E-Mail" where you can more readily review messages on a per-user basis - which also makes it easier to retain privacy of messages.

We're pleased to say that you can now choose to have your spam handled in this way - and even better, there are now 3 categories of "Spam" detection - "Confirmed Spam" - messages the system thinks is almost certainly spam, "Suspected Spam" - things it cannot be too sure of, but there are enough "spam like" characteristics it's pretty likely, and "Bulk" - mail that probably isn't spam and is likely just a bulk e-mail shot.

That means you can handle those messages (per domain) differently. For example, you might want "confirmed spam" sent to a "Spam Samples" account out of the way, keeping clutter down for users, while those messages that are considered "Bulk" and "Suspect" sent to the user, but clearly tagged as such and diverted to those "Junk E-Mail" folders in case they do need to be reviewed.

In addition, messages ReDirected to "Spam Samples" or "Tagged and Delivered" will now retain the original sender name and e-mail address data making it even easier to spot any false positive (messages thought to be spam but actually legitimate) scenarios.

- Improved Virus Detection

The new platform has far superior virus detection, able to read deep into files and nested files (for example files hidden inside another - like a .zip file), and now has the capability to react quickly to new Virus Outbreaks. This makes it even better than before and takes care of more viruses than the previous version, adapting "dynamically" 24 hours a day as conditions change.

When is this changing?

Any new customer subscribing as of 2013 will be provisioned to the new Platform automatically. Customers who use the current platform will be migrated during January. If you currently have your Spam redirected to the special "Spam Samples" account, this will continue once you're migrated. If you'd like to start receiving messages to a "Spam Samples" account or switch to our new "Tag and Deliver" options, contact our Support Team who can make the appropriate changes.

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

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