Cloudmark ActiveFilter™ for Mail Stores
Greater Accuracy through Efficient Mail Store Cleanup
The messaging security landscape has long resembled a speed race between attackers and anti-spam solution providers. To penetrate inboxes, spammers are constantly altering their message contents in an effort to get them delivered before anti-spam defenses start to block them. This practice has also lead to an increase in the total volume of spam sent, which now constitutes more than 95 percent of all e-mail traffic.
Today, spammers employ extremely sophisticated evasive techniques such as using botnets for message delivery. Spammers employ thousands of compromised computers to send huge volumes of rapidly changing messages as quickly as possible. Millions of messages can be originated by bots in less than a minute.
These types of attacks present a significant challenge to service providers. Even with the most effective filtering and anti-spam policies in place, a small amount of spam can slip through to the mail store. And that's where Cloudmark ActiveFilter takes over.
Taking the Time Advantage Away From Spammers
The small percentage of spam messages initially missed during scanning are typically identified by Cloudmark just seconds or minutes after delivery — but before the recipient has a chance to check his messages. Cloudmark ActiveFilter for Mail Stores increases overall spam capture rates by continuously reviewing newly-available fingerprints to see if messages delivered to the mail store within the past several hours are actually spam. This greatly reduces the impact of high-speed attacks that attempt to capitalize on any degree of latency in spam filter updates.
Re-checking the entire mail store is not feasible due to the high resource demand required to reprocess terabytes or petabytes of data in the typical carrier's mail store. Cloudmark ActiveFilter doesn't need to rescan every physical message. Instead, it uses a "push" paradigm that moves or deletes only specific stored messages that have been identified as spam after initial delivery.
Efficiently finding newly-identified spam
Cloudmark ActiveFilter achieves its efficiency through Cloudmark's Advanced Message Fingerprinting technology that reduces a spam message to a lightweight set of "fingerprints" — a unique abstraction of the message. Cloudmark ActiveFilter caches fingerprints that have been scanned and delivered to the mail store while also continually monitoring for new fingerprint updates from Cloudmark's Global Threat Network™. If there's a match between a newly-identified spam fingerprint and a message in the mail store, ActiveFilter notifies the mail store to take action on just that specific message.
ActiveFilter virtually neutralizes any advantages of advanced spam distribution techniques designed to evade traditional "one-shot" content filters. The result: dramatically lower levels of spam and minimal impact to CPU and disk resources.
Cloudmark ActiveFilter Key Benefits
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
Even Greater Accuracy | Cloudmark ActiveFilter extends the industry-leading accuracy of Cloudmark Authority® by enabling detection of spam messages that been delivered in the previous seconds or minutes. |
No Rescanning | Cloudmark ActiveFilter only acts upon specific messages within the mail store that have changed classification and doesn't touch legitimate messages. |
Negligible Performance Impact | Like the Cloudmark Authority solution itself, ActiveFilter creates a negligible impact on system resources because it searches only for fingerprints of abusive messages. There's no rescanning of terabytes or petabytes of e-mail. |
Lower Online Storage Requirements | Most carriers find that their online storage requirements decrease by as much as 20 percent through the use of ActiveFilter. |
Carrier-Grade Horizontal Scalability | Because of its resource efficiency, ActiveFilter can support even the largest carrier implementations. |
A Better User Experience | With Cloudmark ActiveFilter, users are exposed to fewer spam and phishing attacks, leading to greater user satisfaction and lower subscriber churn. |
Cloudmark ActiveFilter Process Flow
To learn more about Cloudmark, email us at sales@cloudmark.com.
For customer support issues, please go to Cloudmark Support.