The Blue Net hosted Spam and Virus filtering solution

Blue Net spam, scam and virus filtering employs Sophos’ PureMessage for Unix solution at its core.

This already excellent solution is enhanced by a variety of additional coding and addons, which improve the overall result to a very stable and accurate filter for spam, scams and viruses.

The email filtering process including Blue Net’s added enhancements is as follows:

• Recipient verification
  The first step in the analysis of an actual email, that is received on Blue Net’s mail filters is the verification of the recipient.Before accepting an email for further assessment (for example for content scanning for viruses or abusive words) the Blue Net mail filter server makes a “call ahead” to the receiving server of the recipient of the email to be processed. If the recipient is identified as invalid no further communication is accepted and the remainder of this email communication is not received. This reduces traffic on your email server, which does not have to send back “unknown user” reports, which can take up significant system and Internet bandwidth resources.
• Email Scanning – Sophos PureMessage
  Once the recipient email address has been identified as acceptable the Sophos PureMessage filtering engine checks the sending email server’s IP address against the Sophos maintained blacklist and each email message body, content and attachments for viruses, spam and scams.
  (Note: This process is vast and varied with actually many 1000s of combinations to identify spam. These are constantly reviewed and updated by Sophos to achieve an accuracy better than 98%.). In this process each email is assigned a spam score. Depending on that score the email is either passed on to you as legitimate or placed in quarantine as spam.
  (You can find this score in your email header when you receive it – http://support.blue.net.au/support/?p=44).
• Listing of all quarantined messages – Quarantine digest
  On a regular basis (usually once daily) all users receive a listing of all their emails, which have been quarantined for them. This listing only contains emails, that have been identified as spam. However any email can be released from quarantine by simply requesting it by reply email (this simple process is described in more detail on the listing email)
• Filter server user interface – PureMessage UI
  Blue Net’s Sophos PureMessage solution also provides a user interface. Users can view their current quarantine status, manage personal white and blacklists and manipulate other options.
  See: https://pmx02.bluenetgroup.com/

This results in the following benefits for the protected organsation:

• Protection from email bourne viruses
• Protection from email bourne scam (ie. phishing and others)
• Protection from email spam
• Protection from offensive email (staff harassment –> stress –> liability)
• Up to 90% reduction of email traffic on customer site’s internet connection and/or email box server thus requiring less resources and ultimately reducing costs.
• Improved staff productivity when processing email communication by not having to deal with large numbers of unwanted spam.
• Reduced stress by virtually eliminating the receiving of offensive medication, porn, mortgage etc spam.

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