How does SAGE Prevent Incoming SPAM on SAGE Email Accounts

Back

• Print
• Email article

Issue:

What steps does SAGE take to prevent SPAM from coming into my SAGE-based email account?

Solution:

With little effective regulation, the no-cost nature of email, and the relative ease of sending mass emails from off-shore locations or hiding behind the veil of legitimate entities (through something called "open relays"), unsolicited commercial email (a.k.a SPAM) has become an increasingly alarming problem.  

SAGE mail servers utilize a variety of very advanced, finely-tuned systems to help combat SPAM and prevent it from entering your mailbox.  Because the spammers continue to find innovative ways to subvert filters, there is no one filter method to effectively prevent spam.  As a result, we have developed a very sophisticated mixture of filters that is very effective.  The systems we use include:

1.  Sender Blocklists.  Our email servers interact with third party "blocklists" that keep track of known SPAM sources.  If our email server encounters a message from one of these sources, our servers will prevent the message from coming in.  Blocklists contain literally hundreds of thousands of blocked senders and the lists are constantly being updated and revised in real-time.  SAGE typically only blocks known SPAM sites.  Other email providers sometimes block "open relays" as well.  An open relay is a legitimate email server that is not configured properly, allowing spammers to use it as a middle-man to shield them from the blocklist defense.  SAGE does not block open relays because blocking them tends to capture some legitimate mail (particularly mail sent from the open relay's legitimate owner or user).

2. IP Address Blocklists.  If certain IP addresses are known repeat offenders, we will take action to shield our servers against those particular IP addresses, regardless of whether they are currently on a sender blocklist.  This protection prevents email from a particular email server, whereas the sender blocklists described above prevent emails from particular senders (regardless of what mail server is used).

3. Included URL Blocklists.  Each email is scanned to look for web addresses that are known to be websites that are included in spam emails.  These blocklists turn out to be a very effective protection mechanism because it is hard for spammers to hide or obfuscate the web addresses like they can easily do to other text in the email.

4. Content Filters.  Our servers also have the capability to filter mail for particular language in the subject or message body.  When our Abuse Team comes across a SPAM message that repeatedly enters our system and is not blocked by a blocklist, the email is added to our permanent content rejection list.  This prevents the email from entering our servers no matter the source of the message.  Note that we do not filter emails based on one word or phrase.  Our systems use advanced detection methodology to determine if the email is really "the same" as the spam message while at the same time being able to recognize minor differences that spammers may incorporate to try to get around a filter.

5. Heuristic Filtering.Our mail servers include a spam filter that attempts to determine whether an incoming message is a spam message or a legitimate email based on hundreds of characteristics.  The filter assigns a score to each message representing the probability that it is spam.  If the score is high enough, the server deletes the message automatically and it never reaches your inbox.  If there is a high probably that the message is spam, but not high enough to trigger automatic deletion, it will add the word "***SPAM***" to the subject an pass it along for your review.  These thresholds are set by the system administrators.

6. Safe Lists.Our admistrators are constantly monitoring incoming email to detect any email that may be incorrectly flagged as spam.  We add these emails to a safe list which prevents those emails or similar ones from getting flagged as spam next time.


Our SPAM response methodology is intended to stop only SPAM.  While more aggressive measures could be taken, they would have the unfortunate consequence of preventing legitimate mail as well as SPAM.  Preventing SPAM and keeping up with the SPAM originators is a dynamic operation.  We are constantly adjusting our various lists and filters to ensure that as much SPAM as possible is prohibited from entering our users' accounts.

More Information:

For more information on how you can personally prevent SPAM from coming to your email address, see Best Practices for Preventing SPAM.

SAGE offers five free email accounts with your research tool subscription.  You can get additional email accounts for a low annual fee.  SAGE email accounts provide you with the ability to choose from one of our six standard domain names, or you can get your own domain name through our Domain Name Registration service.  Having your own domain name gives your company the professional appearance it deserves!

Additional spam related articles:
Spam Filter Scoring Methodology
How to set up a rule in Outlook to take advantage of spam filtering
Unsolicited Email (a.k.a. SPAM)

Back to list New search Print Copy Link Email article