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How The Entegraty MailController Anti-Spam Service Works

Mail is processed through a number of filters, which include:

Black and white lists

These are configurable lists of email addresses (or domains) that organisations explicitly block or allow through the service. The lists can be maintained at a domain level or for a specific user.

Adaptive spam engine

The adaptive spam engine is the heart of MailController antispam. It uses a combination of techniques to analyse each email message and assign the message a 'spam score'. This score is used to determine the likelihood of the message being spam.

The rules used to assign a spam score include:

Real time black lists

These dynamic lists contain IP addresses of machines that are used to send spam messages. MailController anti-spam tests to see if email messages were sent from such a known source of spam.

Lexical analysis

The spam engine contains several thousand lexical tests that look for characteristics in the email that would be indicative of a junk message. These include tests that examine the header of the email looking for anomalies such as no 'from' address or badly formed headers. In addition the spam engine analyses the body of the message looking for common strings and key words indicative of spam.