Killing the Corporate Hydra: Spam E-Mail

optimzing the McAfee solution for corporate use. The
SpamKiller products, which are designated as being
“powered by McAfee SpamAssassin,” have the benefit of
McAfee’s strict quality procedures and customer focus,
as well as future technology improvements that will be
available only in the McAfee SpamKiller products.

How SpamKiller Works

As described in the excerpt above, the SpamKiller
extensive rule-based scoring system determines
whether a particular e-mail message is spam. Hundreds
of rules are run against every e-mail; each rule is
associated with a score, positive or negative. Rules with
negative scores indicate attributes of legitimate e-mail,
while rules with positive scores indicate attributes of
unsolicited spam e-mail.

A genetic algorithm optimizes the scoring, using an
archive of millions of spam and non-spam messages to
determine the scores for the individual rules. When
added together, these individual scores give each e-mail
an “overall spam rating.” SpamKiller is extremely accurate
“out of the box,” catching more than 95 percent of all
spam e-mail with zero user customization, while giving a
very low false positive rate of less than 0.05 percent.
In addition to its low false positive rates, the
SpamAssassin technology is designed to not delete or
bounce suspected spam, so if a false positive e-mail is
detected, negative business impact is minimized.

When a potential false-positive e-mail is detected it is either
quarantined in a special folder, or tagged to visibly
identify it as likely to be spam. It is not advisable to
automatically delete potential spam e-mail, since
legitimate communications can be erroneously discarded.
In general, as soon as the SpamAssassin engine
identifies spam e-mail, it marks the message as spam by
changing the message header, subject line, or both.
Based on finding the necessary keyword in the subject
line or message headers, Microsoft Exchange or
Microsoft Outlook will then re-direct the e-mail. McAfee
SpamKiller products give administrators several choices.
The e-mail can be either moved to a junk mail folder in
the individual’s Microsoft Outlook application on the
desktop, or moved to a system-wide junk mail folder on
the Exchange server. The latter is dependent on
whether McAfee SpamKiller for Exchange is installed on
the server, and its junk mail folder set up.

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