Email Security – Industry Challenges

Enterprise Email Challenges

Enterprises struggle to deal with email security issues such as spam, spyware and phishing. Spam continues to grow to unprecedented levels of 50 billion emails per day and 80-90% of all email traffic worldwide (Gartner). Many enterprises now rate spam as their number one concern, well ahead of viruses, worms, spyware and hack attacks (Frost and Sullivan). The global volume of email spam is forecast to double in 2007.

Conventional spam technology focuses on blocking as much spam as possible. As the levels of spam increase, the spam filters become more aggressive and in the process also inadvertently block an increasing percentage of legitimate business email, causing "false positives". Despite anti-spam solution vendor claims of extremely low false positive rates, the volume of legitimate email being blocked is increasing. It is estimated that as much as 1% of email being stopped by conventional anti-spam filters is actually legitimate email. This has a very high potential business cost to the enterprise.

The challenge is that organizations have no real way to quantify how much legitimate email is blocked, or "lost" in quarantine trays. Large email users often have several staff dedicated to dealing with user spam issues and tracking down missing emails.

Technology Issues

Most conventional anti-spam solutions are based on content filtering and IP-based filtering (using RBLs – Real-Time Block Lists).

Content filtering has several limitations as it is based on statistical probability and inherently introduces errors where good email is misclassified as spam. Content filtering also has limitations in dealing with multi-language email, as well as with non-English character email (especially Asian, doublebyte and Arabic characters). The use of content filtering to deal with the rise in image spam is also proving less than effective.

The use of RBLs also leads to misclassification of valid email as being spam. These lists contain IP addresses which are suspected of being "spam" originators and often lists whole IP ranges. RBLs are routinely incorrect and mistakenly classify IP’s as being "spam originators", based on honeypots and unsubstantiated user reports. This can impact any legitimate organisation which shares an IP block with a "suspected" spammer. The RBL listing process is completely arbitrary, and not regulated or subject to any standards, meaning that legitimate organisations (even major ones) often find themselves having their emails being invalidly blocked by current generation anti-spam filters relying on industry-standard RBLs.

Multi-language, non-English spam

Most current anti-spam technologies are incapable of dealing accurately with multi-language emails, and are often unable to accurately distinguish between legitimate non-English language email and spam. Very few can deal effectively with Asian character email.

RealMail, using its patented technology, has been engineered to ensure that legitimate emails, regardless of their language, are always protected.

The Email Security Challenge

The email security challenges, and the solution can be very simply defined:

Problem:

Spam levels are increasing

Spam filters are becoming more aggressive

More good emails are being incorrectly blocked

Challenge:

How to protect legitimate email?

Yet still keep spam and security threats out

Solution:

Enhance existing spam filters with an Email Authentication Layer

BoxSentry’s Approach

As email has become a critical form of business communication, organisations have realised that the security challenge has shifted from merely stopping spam, to avoiding the loss of legitimate email correspondence.

BoxSentry has combined advanced technology with intelligent business logic to create a simple, yet highly effective solution against spam. The focus is to firstly protect legitimate email using a combination of patented email authentication techniques, emerging email authentication standards (such as DKIM, Sender ID), and Positive Sender Reputation data (from trusted, reliable suppliers of such data).

As the industry evolves, it is becoming clear that an approach using POSITIVE is more important, and more reliable than using NEGATIVE reputation data. (Good senders generally send emails from stable IPs, use the same email addresses, and comply with accepted conventions – i.e. they play by the rules. Spammers in contrast do not.)

BoxSentry believes that identifying and protecting good senders FIRST is a far more effective way of dealing with email, rather than trying to continuously identify bad senders. BoxSentry’s philosophy is that "it is more important to protect ‘good senders’ FIRST, rather than block ‘bad senders’ FIRST". Blocking bad senders is what most current generation anti-spam solutions are geared to do.

BoxSentry incorporates all the leading industry standards into its authentication platform. As part of leading anti-email abuse working groups, BoxSentry contributes to and incorporates the latest email standards as they emerge. These include DKIM (Domain Key Identity Management; Sender ID) as well as emerging standards such as CSA (Client SMTP Authorisation). It also incorporates essential positive authentication data from leading trust authorities (such as Habeas).

Using reputation data and authentication techniques, RealMail protects legitimate email AS WELL AS stops spam.

RealMail provides complete protection from spam email, spoofing and phishing attacks - all without the risk of losing legitimate email.

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