Spam Protection

The relays utilize two layers of protection against spam: reputation filtering and anti-spam filters.

Reputation Filtering

The IronPort Reputation Filters use IronPort SenderBase data to identify suspicious email senders and stop incoming spam at the connection level or rate limit the senders. This technology eliminates 80% of incoming spam.

Spam Tagging

There are many rules that are considered for deciding whether it is likely that any given message is spam or not. IronPort's Context Adaptive Scanning Engine (CASE) detects threats by analyzing four aspects of a message that together provide it's context:

• Who sent the message and what do we know about this sender?
• Where does the call to action in the message take you?
• What is the nature of the message content?
• How was the message technically constructed?

Spam Quarantining

Messages with a spam score of greater or equal than 50 and less than 90 will be quarantined. (Messages that score greater than 90 will be discarded.) The spam quarantine is https://devnull.tamu.edu:8443.

The spam quarantine provided by IronPort is a self-service system which provides end-users with their own safe holding area for spam messages and a Web or email-based interface for end-users to access emails flagged by CASE.

A usedful Web site for information on this topic is Help Desk Central's documentation on IronPort's spam quarantine.