Email Spam can have serious side affects to the running of your computer. It can cause you to loose data, run slow and much more. Spammers can disguise their actions in many ways. Spam is defined as the deliberate sending of the identical email to many people. Not all bulk sending is spam. For instance a school sending out a letter is defined as spam but is wanted mail. Postini can be configured to get those emails you want while still blocking out that harmful spam emails that contain virus’s.
Postini Email Security ensures your email is free from threats and junk mail, keeping your company compliant and productive. It blocks spam, viruses, phishing, and email threats, and provides sophisticated message management and policy enforcement. Staff regains time lost by distracting spam and inappropriate communications. In addition, policy compliance is assured via Postini's automated archiving, which provides a Google-like interface for email discovery and retrieval.
Postini's on-demand service deploys quickly, requiring no on-site hardware or software. With Postini you will realize immediate capital and operating cost reductions; your costs of email security and compliance will be known and predictable, month-to-month. Postini's patented technology platform provides highly accurate filtering, multiple redundant layers of threat protection, granular administrative controls, and unmatched performance.
Postini Email Security delivers the highest enterprise-class service levels for availability, reliability, support, and scalability. With multiple redundant data centers around the world, massive storage and bandwidth, 99.999% availability, and 24x7 support, Postini is the trusted partner for communications security and compliance in corporations worldwide.
E-mail spam is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. Spam is e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, a common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Â Spammers frequently disguise their messages with obfuscated text.
As the recipient directly bears the cost of delivery, storage, and processing, one could regard spam as the electronic equivalent of "postage-due" junk mail. However, this does not mean that all commercial email is spam; for example, some recipients may have opted in (i.e., willingly chosen) to receive the marketer's email.
Spammers may engage in deliberate fraud to send out their messages. Spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. They also often use falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to move quickly from one account to the next as the host ISPs discover and shut down each one. Senders may go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. Large companies may hire another firm to send their messages so that complaints or blocking of email falls on a third party. Others engage in spoofing of e-mail addresses (much easier than IP address spoofing). The e-mail protocol (SMTP) has no authentication by default, so the spammer can pretend to relay a message apparently from any e-mail address. To prevent this, some ISPs and domains require the use of SMTP-AUTH, allowing positive identification of the specific account from which an e-mail originates. Senders cannot completely spoof e-mail delivery chains (the 'Received' header), since the receiving mail server records the actual connection from the last mail server’s IP address. To counter this, some spammers forge additional delivery headers to make it appear as if the e-mail had previously traversed many legitimate servers.
Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as open mail relays and open proxy servers. The SMTP system, used to send e-mail across the Internet, forwards mail from one server to another; mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication that the user is a customer of that ISP. Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it quite a bit harder to track down spammers.
Increasingly, spammers use networks of virus-infected PCs (zombies) to send their spam. Zombie networks are also known as Botnets. In June 2006, an estimated 80% of e-mail spam’s were sent by zombie PCs, an increase of 30% from the prior year. An estimated 55 billion e-mail spam’s were sent each day in June 2006, an increase of 25 billion per day from June 2005.
Spoofing can have serious consequences for legitimate e-mail users. Not only can their e-mail inboxes get clogged up with "undeliverable" e-mails in addition to volumes of spam, they can mistakenly be identified as a spammer. Not only may they receive irate e-mail from spam victims, but (if spam victims report the e-mail address owner to the ISP, for example) their ISP may terminate their service for spamming.
Electronic mail is mission-critical for businesses of all sizes. Email productivity, availability, quality, and compliance are core issues for all companies businesses simply cannot function efficiently without reliable email.
But today more than 85% of all electronic mail traffic is a waste of time, consisting of spam, malicious threats, or offensive material. Businesses are under siege from increasingly sophisticated networks of criminal hackers, spammers, and phishers. In addition, you now have to manage email communications to protect your intellectual property (IP), be proactive against lawsuits, and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates, like Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP), State Information Privacy Acts, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
