IHOT Postini Overview

How to Stop the SPAM?

Internet Hotline has partnered with Postini, Inc.to offer their spam filtering and virus protection services.

Why should I use Postini and not some other program?

There are many approaches to filtering spam. Internet Hotline investigated many different approaches before establishing a relationship with Postini. We found that Postini approach to to filtering spam was the most effective approach. To better understand why we choose Postini, we will explain the different ways Spam and virus are filtered.

So why is Spam such a problem?

Let's say you get 100 e-mail per day in your mailbox. You use, for this example, Outlook Express as your e-mail program to download them to your computer. The 100 messages are all downloaded no matter how big they may be. But lets say each message is 10K in size. This would make the total size of all the messages to be downloaded(10K times 100) 1 Meg of data. This takes some amount of time and bandwidth. You then have to handle the 100 messages. You review and then delete the ones that are of no value to you. You could even purchase a program that could do this for you but you still have to get the email to your computer to do this.

Another approach is to let a program at the server scan messages and attach the word SPAM to the header of the messages. This would help you to determine what messages might be spam. But the messages still have to be downloaded to your computer and you would still have to do something with each message. You could create a filter in Outlook and have the messages moved to your trash folder. The works as well but you would still have to download all the messages to your computer.

So what makes Postini a better choice?

Its how they scan the e-mail. All the e-mail is delivered directly to Postini for scanning and then only what can be called the good e-mail is delivered to IHOT for placement into your mailbox. Is this a slower process? Well to be truthful we have to say yes it is, but only by hundreds of a second.Lets look at this process using the same example we use above. 100 messages a day having a average size of 10K. Lets assume that 70 percent of the messages are spam. As the messages arrive they are filtered and only the 30 percent of good messages are delivered. This reduced the total download of e-mail from 1Meg to 300K worth of messages. Less time spent downloading messages means less bandwidth usage and increased productivity. Summary: Message are filtered at Postini and reduce the number of messages in your mailbox.

Why do I need it?

Despite new technologies and laws introduced in 2004, the threat of phishing attacks, zombie (define) computers and directory harvest attacks (DHA) continue to plague companies and end users. "The spam problem is far from 'solved,' and I think everyone realizes this," said Chris Smith, Postini's senior product marketing director. "You know, we've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this problem." He points to several actions taken by the tech industry and the U.S. government to halt, or even slow down, the growing spam problem: the CAN-SPAM Act, the controversial law that went into effect in January 2004; the rise of new technologies like Sender ID for E-Mail and DomainKeys; and court sentences handed down to convicted spammers. Technologies like Postini's managed e-mail security service, software solutions from Symantec or McAfee or appliance-based e-mail security from companies like CipherTrust, haven't really put a dent in the overall spam problem, Smith said. Postini's results, gathered from more than 4,200 domains who generate roughly 400 million e-mail connections every day, found other trends in 2004:

The average company gets hit with a directory harvest attack (DHA), a request sent to e-mail servers in an attempt to find legitimate e-mail addresses, 150 times a day. With an average of 250 invalid e-mail delivery attempts per DHA, this results in an average of 37,500 delivery attempts per day.
75 to 80 percent of all e-mail is spam and another 10 percent is comprised of some form of phishing (define), Denial of Service (define) attack, DHA or virus threat.
The number of virus-infected e-mails has tripled in the last year, accounting for 1.5 percent of all e-mails. More than one-third of all spam is sent by zombie computers.
One percent of spam is some variety of phishing attack.

Another statistical trend reported by Postini is that the size of a company and its industry helps determine how much spam a user gets. Postini reported that companies with fewer than 100 e-mail users received 35 spam messages per day, per user. Enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, however, received fewer than three per day, per user. E-mail users in particular industries are susceptible to more spam, with publishing and advertising industries receiving more than 25 spam e-mails per user, per day, while employees in the pharmaceutical, electronics and food and beverage industries receive about one spam message per user, per day. Postini has also stated that spammers target smaller companies because they expect the defenses there to be less stringent than at larger companies or because smaller companies are less disciplined about protecting e-mail addresses. As the sophistication of e-mail-delivered attacks increases, vendors will need to provide a more all-in-one solution to customers who are looking for a single vendor to provide a complete e-mail security option. Postini Services can supply this type of protection for pennies a day.

Can I use Postini to block spam from my Mail Box.

Most definitely Postini was designed to protect your mailbox and to allow you to make better use of your time.

I have a exchange server that receives all the mail for my company. Can I use Postini.

Yes you can. There are just a few items that you have to change. You just point your MX records and Postini will start filtering your mail. For the complete details see our page on how to use Postini with external mail servers.