Mailsafe

Anti spam

Altospam’s Mailsafe is located upstream of your mail server. It processes and blocks unsolicited incoming e-mails before they reach your systems. All logs and reception information are accessible in real time via a dedicated interface.

Anti virus

Your e-mails are scanned by 6 antivirus programs plus a high-performance suspicious file detection system to block known and unknown viruses. Our virus databases and detection engines are updated several times an hour, incorporating the latest developments.

Anti malware/ ransomware

Mailsafe blocks
ransomware
ransomware before it reaches your computer. mailboxes. Any malicious email or malware is filtered and stopped by our solution. The Mailsafe anti-malware and anti-ransomware solution blocks most sophisticated polymorphic malware and ransomware.

Anti phishing

Phishing is a counterfeit message presenting identity theft. It invites the recipient to reply or click on a link to provide information. The aim of this technique is to rob individuals of their login or bank details.

Anti spear phishing

Spear phishing is one of the most targeted and personalized of all email attacks. Spear phishing or BEC (Business Email Compromise) attacks are among the most costly attacks, based on the usurpation of the sender’s identity. Our Mailsafe email security solution is designed to detect president scams (
FOVI
) and spear phishing emails.

Anti-relay

Mailsafe from Altospam fights relaying to prevent your server being used by a third party to send illicit mail.

Anti scam

The
scams
are e-mail scams in which you are solicited for large sums of money.

Bounce management

Bounces are handled in such a way that legitimate bounces (those corresponding to real distribution failures concerning you) are accepted and those originating from spam sent by spammers who have impersonated you are refused. ALTOSPAM’s action on bounces can be configured to accept or reject them.

Denial of service (DDOS)

Your servers are no longer directly visible on the Internet, but are accessible via ALTOSPAM. Mailsafe includes specific rules to prevent denial-of-service attacks.

Anti advertising

Anti-advertising filtering is a free Mailsafe option for blocking the flow of advertising mails. Commercial email, unlike spam, is legal. Activating this option allows the administrator to block the reception of advertisements for some or all of his users.

Heuristic analysis

Heuristic analysis is a set of rules represented as regular expressions. It searches for e-mails whose headers and/or bodies correspond to very specific characteristics known to have a high probability of being spam. ALTOSPAM uses a custom rules base to identify both American and French spam.

Blacklist | IP Reputation

RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) or DNSBL (Back List DNS) are lists of servers or networks known to assist, host, produce or retransmit spam, or provide a service that can be used as a medium for sending spam. Mailsafe uses the leading community and commercial RBLs on the market.

Collaborative spam databases

These spam signature databases are used in the same way as virus signature databases. They are fed by users of anti-spam solutions.

DNS records

Checks the correlation between the source server’s IP address and its name via a reverse DNS query. Typically, dedicated mail servers have a fixed, bijective IP address with its associated domain name. This information can’t always be used with shared messaging services, but is still worth including in the analysis.

Bayesian filters

Probabilistic filtering method learning e-mails based on the statistical distribution of keywords in e-mails. This type of algorithm adapts itself based on the analysis of known spam and non-spam emails.

White list

List of safe sites, hosts, domains or addresses. By default, very few hosts are considered safe, as their addresses could be spoofed by spammers. However, Altospam uses a self-learning whitelist system to speed up processing time for transmitters already tested and considered safe. What’s more, Altospam lets you set up your own whitelist.

Transaction history

Previous transactions between the sender and receiver of a message influence the result of the analysis. People who are used to sending each other legitimate e-mails have no reason to send each other spam.

URL addresses

The purpose of analyzing the URLs in the message body is to identify and filter the e-mail according to the desired action: the user clicking on a promotional link. This analysis is based on the detection of suspicious sites and URLs (numeric, badly formatted).

SPF and DKIM

Anti-spam techniques known as SPF (
Sender Policy Framework
) and DKIM (
DomainKeys Identified Mail
) are designed to authenticate the sender of a message. SPF announces the mail servers authorized to send emails for a given domain. DKIM signs emails sent by mail servers to ensure their integrity.

Sender domain validation

To be considered legitimate to send e-mail, a domain must comply with a certain number of standards. We analyze the email sender’s domain to validate that the sender is able to receive emails.

Image, HTML & Pdf analysis

HTML code embedded in messages, as well as certain PDF files, may contain dangerous javascript elements. Mailsafe examines the HTML code and PDF files contained in an e-mail to identify any dangerous code or abnormal behavior.

ALTOSPAM examines the images and PDF files contained in an e-mail on various bases: number, type, size, format and dimensions, then compares these criteria with the characteristics of the images used by spammers.

Teergrubing

A technique for significantly reducing the response speed of the server by maintaining the session.
SMTP, on certain connections considered suspicious. Teergrubing can be used to restrict the spam server.

Greylisting

The greylisting is an anti-spam technique that consists of temporarily rejecting a message, by sending a temporary refusal code to the sending server. The sending server resends the mail after a few minutes – most spam servers don’t bother! (Cf.
Our article on Greylisting)

Turing test

This technique, also known as challenge/response, consists of sending an email requesting authentication to the sender.
authentication request to the sender
of the message (via the reproduction of a displayed code) to ensure its actual physical existence. Used on its own, this technology has a number of disadvantages (filtering work shifted to the message sender, systematic sending of often unsolicited messages, generation of false positives). When integrated with other technologies and used judiciously at the end of the analysis, it frees up the
false positives unresolved.

Office document control

VBA macros or scripts in Office documents are currently one of the main vectors of viral infection. Using sandboxing, Mailsafe monitors the activity of these scripts to establish their potential dangerousness, in order to identify and block dangerous attachments.