MessageLabs applies revolutionary anti-virus technology to let firms control what gets through.
- Inability to define what constitutes spam seen as root of problem
- 10% of every working day in UK spent dealing with spam
- Survey shows 58% of US Business Managers unable to manage spam
Yui Kee is now supplying MessageLabs new anti-spam service as YKScan AS. It promises to lead the anti-spam market with success rates of over 95%. Spam is now fast becoming a major headache for HK business, greatly impacting on business’ bottom lines, with employee time, bandwidth and storage space all compromised.
According to new Anglo-American research conducted on behalf of MessageLabs, one in three US emails contains spam compared to one in seven in the UK. Hong Kong is not avoiding this global trend. The research also shows the problem of spam is here to stay, with only a third of UK email users describing spam as no problem now, and three quarters of respondents predicting that it will be a ‘much’ or ‘somewhat’ bigger problem in the year ahead.
Unlike with email viruses, firms have difficulty determining what is and isn’t spam leading to an ‘all or nothing’ approach to its prevention that fails to recognise the varying interests and needs of recipients. Indeed, nearly half of those questioned who had current spam filtering technology in place said that it was ‘ineffective’ or ‘very ineffective’.
To combat the spam problem, and offer firms a method of detection which is flexible, intelligent and does not rely on exact match lists, MessageLabs has applied the same market leading technology it uses on viruses to identify spam at the internet level, before it reaches the customer’s system.
YKScan AS goes beyond the blacklist/whitelist filtering approach, which only picks up spam from known spammers. Instead it uses ‘heuristics’ scanning to build an ever-expanding knowledge base of spam techniques and behaviour to proactively identify spam no matter what its origin.
The heuristics method works by scoring each email against a set of rules. If the message achieves more than a specified score it is instantly identified as spam and the customer can choose from the tag and block options available. Businesses are therefore able to control what email does and does not get through.