Anti-spam software maker Mail-Filters has a new deal to provide spam signatures technology to Elron Software for the latter's Message Inspector Version 4 product, with the third upgrade of Version 4, which is expected to go on sale in September.
Elron vice president of sales Adam Bosnian said in a statement the deal lets Elron customers take on "the increasingly complex tricks" spammers use to get around cyberspaces' bids to block them. "By providing this third layer of spam protection from Mail-Filters, our customers can rest assured that they are getting the best possible solution that utilizes three different approaches to identify spam -- a heuristics-based spam engine, a full-text analysis (FTA) engine and now a signature database," Bosnian said.
Bringing in the Mail-Filters spam signature database and scan engine, the two companies said, would give Message Inspector another level of spam protection with better accuracy, better false-positive performance results, better HTML detection, and even giving the end user a daily update of spam-related activity.
Message Inspector claims a less than 1 in 100,000 false positive rate and 95 percent plus accuracy.
"Spammers use many methods to get around spam-blocking technology," said Mail-Filters chief executive officer Ben Westbrook in his own statement. "Heuristics, linguistic analysis and computational analysis used to be enough to counter most of those methods, but now the most effective counter is a spam signature database…with our signature solution, Elron's Message Inspector V4 has all the technology needed to block new variants of spam and nearly eliminate false positives."
Mail-Filters also uses human editors to fashion each spam signature, which involves "attributes that are most likely to be repeated from one spam message to the other," the company said. " These editors often create many signatures for one spam message, making it extremely difficult for spammers to defeat the filter. With new spam being created every day, the database of signatures is continuously updated to maintain effectiveness. This process differentiates it from other signature technologies that use an automated process to calculate a checksum or hash value (fingerprint) for the entire message."
