| Week: 1 |
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Question: |
How effective is MailMarshal at stopping spam and is it accurate? |
| Answer: |
MailMarshal is capable of delivering spam detection rates of between 90- and 95-percent and accuracy rates (false positives) of between 0.01- and 0.1-percent. |
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| Week: 2 |
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Question: |
Spammers are always coming-up with new ways to spam... how do you keep MailMarshal current? |
| Answer: |
MailMarshal features a new dynamic update service that automatically delivers SpamCensor pattern updates to optimize anti-spam capabilities and keep up-to-date with the latest anti-spam enhancements from NetIQ. The dynamic update service can also upgrade the SpamCensor engine to include new improvements in technology and add anti-spam capabilities to MailMarshal with no service disruptions. |
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| Week: 3 |
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Question: |
What happens if someone I want to receive email from gets put onto a blacklist? Won't that keep me from getting email from that source? |
| Answer: |
MailMarshal makes exceptions for trusted sources in the event that an email correspondence partner, such as a customer, is incorrectly listed on a blacklist service, MailMarshal can be instructed to exempt that trusted source from DNS checks. |
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| Week: 4 |
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Question: |
Does MailMarshal do anything besides anti-spam? |
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MailMarshal delivers anti-virus, content filtering, reporting and email archiving. WebMarshal and imMarshal provide the same types of protection for web browsing and instant messaging. |
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| Week: 5 |
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Question: |
How do you handle image-only spam, or image-only spam with random white-on-white text? |
| Answer: |
Spammers can create test in an HTML email message where the foreground and background colors are the same. The recipient of the message cannot see this text, but a lexical analysis engine can. Spammers use this technique to place text in a message that would cause a lexical analysis engine to push the word weightings in a direction that would make the message appear to not be Spam. MailMarshal cannot be fooled by this type of behavior. |
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| Week: 6 |
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Question: |
What is a false positive? |
| Answer: |
A false positive is a message classified as spam which is not spam - basically, where the anti-spam filter gets it wrong. In the worst case a false positive would be a legitimate, important business email message such as a customer order. More commonly, a false positive is on a newsletter or other form of bulk mail that has been solicited and is expected by the user. False positives are normally denoted by the false positive rate. A perfect false positive rate would be zero but most good anti-spam filters can achieve false positives rates between 0.01 and 0.001. MailMarshal consistently scores a rate lower than 0.01 false positives. |
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| Week: 7 |
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Question: |
What does "Bayesian" mean? |
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"Bayesian" refers to a statistical probability theorem developed by one Thomas Bayes (a mathematician) in the 1700's. The theory involves the application of prior knowledge and accumulated experience to model future events. How this relates to spam and the identification of spam is simple. We can analyze spam and non-spam email messages and build a picture of what spam looks like and what it does not look like. Based on this knowledge, we can then analyze a new email message we have not encountered before and compare it with what we know from past experiences to be spam. If it looks like spam then it must be spam. |
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| Week: 8 |
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Question: |
How did spammers get my email address? |
| Answer: |
Spammers have many methods of acquiring your email address. The 8 most common methods are:
| 1. | From user registrations at unscrupulous web sites |
| 2. | From user newsgroup postings |
| 3. | From user chat sessions |
| 4. | From spambots that crawl the web for any "@" sign |
| 5. | From email lists the spammer buys (normally on CD-ROM) |
| 6. | From mailing lists to which users subscribe |
| 7. | By randomly generating name combinations for your domain |
| 8. | By harvesting all the email addresses on your company's server (known as a DHA or Directory Harvesting Attack) |
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| Week: 9 |
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Question: |
How do I stop getting spam? |
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This is really a difficult question to answer as it depends on your specific circumstances. For users at home the best ways to stop spam really come down to best practices. Things such as:
- Never respond to spam - when you do, you flag your email address as active and actually increase the likelihood that you will be sent spam
- Don't post your email address anywhere in a useable format that a spam program can harvest and use. One way of protecting your email address is to add text which a human must delete to use your email address (e.g. myaddress.deletethispart@hotmail.com). Spammers are lazy and any extra work where they have to manually delete elements of your email address will dramatically decease the usefulness of your email address for spamming purposes
- Switch to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) which offers FREE anti-spam filtering. However, investigate what sort of filtering is provided and how you can access false positives if needs be (a bad filter can be worse than getting spam in the first place)
For a company or organization, the best method of reducing spam is really a combination of technology, education and policy. Organizations should develop clear policies regarding spam and educate employees on these policies. For example: "Employees must not respond to spam". "Employees must not post their work email addresses on personal newsgroups or bulletin boards". "Employees must not subscribe to newsletters which are not work related with their work email address". These polices should then be augmented with anti-spam technology such as NetIQ's email content security product MailMarshal. Anti-spam technology can really only reduce instances of spam, it is not entirely capable of eliminating spam on its own. This is why it should be combined with policy, education, and ultimately, intelligent legislation from government.
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| Week: 10 |
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Question: |
How do I stop getting spam? |
| Answer: |
This is really a difficult question to answer as it depends on your specific circumstances. For users at home the best ways to stop spam really come down to best practices. Things such as:
- Never respond to spam - when you do, you flag your email address as active and actually increase the likelihood that you will be sent spam
- Don't post your email address anywhere in a useable format that a spam program can harvest and use. One way of protecting your email address is to add text which a human must delete to use your email address (e.g. myaddress.deletethispart@hotmail.com). Spammers are lazy and any extra work where they have to manually delete elements of your email address will dramatically decease the usefulness of your email address for spamming purposes
- Switch to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) which offers FREE anti-spam filtering. However, investigate what sort of filtering is provided and how you can access false positives if needs be (a bad filter can be worse than getting spam in the first place)
For a company or organization, the best method of reducing spam is really a combination of technology, education and policy. Organizations should develop clear policies regarding spam and educate employees on these policies. For example: "Employees must not respond to spam". "Employees must not post their work email addresses on personal newsgroups or bulletin boards". "Employees must not subscribe to newsletters which are not work related with their work email address". These polices should then be augmented with anti-spam technology such as NetIQ's email content security product MailMarshal. Anti-spam technology can really only reduce instances of spam, it is not entirely capable of eliminating spam on its own. This is why it should be combined with policy, education, and ultimately, intelligent legislation from government.
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| Week: 11 |
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Question: |
How do I unsubscribe to newsletters? |
| Answer: |
Any legitimate, reputable organization that sends bulk email in the form of newsletters must provide a working unsubscribe facility. Most newsletters will have an email address that you can email and have yourself removed from the mailing list, or possibly you are required to reply to the newsletter with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line. Legitimate newsletters should provide instructions for unsubscribing in their text, typically towards the bottom. If a newsletter does not have an unsubscribe facility or does not remove you from their list after three attempts to unsubscribe then the newsletter should be considered spam and you should report the message to the appropriate authorities. |
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