How RealMail Works

RealMail is a secure messaging solution designed to eliminate spam, viruses and other security threats whilst ensuring that a user's legitimate email is always delivered. It does so by using highly advanced patented technology together with positive email authentication techniques. This approach challenges the conventional approach used in current generation anti-spam solutions.

RealMail’s Email Authentication System provides a unique technology platform that integrates automatically self-learning "accept" lists, sophisticated heuristics, reputation data and multi-stage positive authentication methods. This virtually eliminates the false positives caused by traditional spam approaches, and ensures that legitimate email is efficiently delivered.

The RealMail solution sits at the network edge between the Firewall and the Mail Server when deployed as an appliance.

• Perimeter Protection:

• IP rate limiting

• Denial of Service protection

• Directory Harvesting Attack (DHA) prevention

• Recipient validation (i.e. checks for valid recipients)

• Protocol checking

• The combination of Perimeter Protection processes eliminates 50-60% of emails at the boundary – without any risk of false positives

• Email Hygiene:

• Check for Viruses/Trojans (using inbuilt AV engine, or customer’s preferred AV engine)

• Anti-spoofing (using DKIM, Sender ID, CSA and other standards. Also uses its own proprietary method based on previous sender history)

• Multi-stage authentication – two components:

• User Accept Lists (or white-listing). RealMail uses active self-learning automated white-listing in order to build the accept lists over time.

• Industry reputation lists based on positive sender reputation. ("Safe lists" which have been generated by organisations that have individually validated that the sender’s IP is safe and compliant with all the industry best practices.)

• Once it has verified that an email sender is on either an accept list, or on a positive reputation list – the email is "fast tracked" to the end user for delivery, avoiding filtering and therefore avoiding the risk of being inadvertently blocked.

• Sender Self-Authentication (SSA)

• SSA is a technique used to enable an unknown sender to "self authenticate".

• SSA messages are only ever sent once, and only to new, unknown senders in order to enable them to self-authenticate, something that robots and spammers are unable to do.

• An SSA message is automatically sent to the original sender in the sender’s own language (using RealMail’s language detection capability)

• Once a sender self-authenticates, they receive automatically receive a confirmation message. This provides added piece of mind that their email has been delivered and not blocked by an anti-spam filter.

• Experience shows that the majority of valid senders self authenticate after which their email is delivered immediately and their address is automatically added to the User Accept List. Spammers simply cannot.

• Quarantine Automation & Heuristics

• Email that cannot be authenticated (via User Accept List, Positive Reputation List and the SSA processes) is analysed carefully as they are most likely to be spam

• Multiple heuristic tests are applied to non-authenticated emails in order to prove (beyond reasonable doubt) that the email is SPAM.

• When an email is proved to be spam, it is held in a quarantine file.

• When it is inconclusive that the email is spam, and the sender cannot be authenticated, this is classified as "Possible Mail". An Alert is sent to the receiver to determine the action required: Accept or Reject the email (ie, user authentication)

• Alert messages typically apply to only 1-2% of all emails and are part of the Quarantine Automation process using push technology to alert users to possibly valid emails, and virtually eliminating the risk of possibly legitimate email being lost with a traditional quarantine approach.