Quarantines Don't Work

Quarantines are an e-mail users nightmare. A Quarantine is a holding areas for e-mails. Anti-spam filters use quarantines when they cannot decide what to do with an e-mail. The dilemma is that the antispam filter:

• Doesn't want to reject legitimate e-mail, but isn't sure that the e-mail is legitimate.

• Doesn't want to forward unwanted e-mail, but isn't sure that the e-mail is unwanted!

Because the antispam filter can't reach a decision on its own, it places the e-mail in a quarantine. By quarantining an e-mail the antispam filter is doing two things; first, it is off-loading its work of filtering e-mail onto the person(s) responsible for managing the quarantine. Second, the filter is admitting that it isn't equipped to handle the e-mail.

Quarantines pose a number of problems including:

• E-Mail can languish in a quarantine for hours, days or longer.
• There is a limit to how large the quarantine can grow.
• E-Mails that have grown stale in the quarantine are (often) silently deleted.
• Important e-mails may go neglected, leaving the sender with the same feeling.
• A person (or all users) must now include checking the quarantine, to their already long list of daily (or hourly) activities.

PerfectMail - Filtering Without Quarantines

PerfectMail deals with all e-mails the instant they arrive. Each e-mail is scanned and is subject to one of only three possible outcomes:

1. Accept. The e-mail is passed through to the recipient instantly and without modification.

2. Tag. If, after performing its full range of tests and then consulting its historical databases, PerfectMail is still unable to determine the status of an e-mail, it tags the E-Mail (either subject line or mail header) with a short keyword to indicate that the e-mail might be spam. The e-mail is forwarded (with this warning) to the intended recipient where it can accepted, filed or discarded by easy-to-implement rules within a e-mail reader (such as Eudora or OutLook).

   Under normal circumstances, PerfectMail tags no more than 0.5 percent of all inbound e-mail. Tag percentages will vary with traffic but rarely, if ever, exceed 1.0%.

3. Reject. The e-mail is refused. PerfectMail sends back an reject code to the sending e-mail server indicating that the e-mail is unwanted. PerfectMail reserves this treatment for obviously unwanted e-mail such as; viruses & worms, heavily obfuscated e-mail and e-mail where the sender has intentionally tried to hide their identity.

   In our experience, a typical business might see as much as 25% of all of their e-mail safely rejected by PerfectMail. In a Small-to-Medium business (SMB) environment, this can mean as many as 2,500 fewer e-mails for staff to handle over the course of a month! At just 30 seconds per unwanted e-mail in handling time, this results in a savings of 20.8 hours over the same month.

The benefits to users are many. PerfectMail delivers all e-mail instantly. Users don't need to waste time digging through a quarantine looking for that one important e-mail. And, unwanted e-mail is kept out of your users inbaskets.

The benefits to the organization are even more substantial. Many hours of unproductive work are eliminated. The workload on expensive Mail Servers is reduced (so the server can handle more users or function longer before requiring performance upgrades). And, the workplace remains free of unwanted, dangerous (viruses), immoral, unethical and possibly illegal e-mail content.