The PerfectMail Bill of Rights - Our Unique Approach to Antispam & Antivirus

Before investing in an Antispam and Antivirus solution for your company, you should look carefully at the product to see if it fits with your own goals for safe, secure and reliable e-mail filtering.

PerfectMail was built to conform to the following principles:

1. Legitimate Mail Must Go Through

   PerfectMail has been programmed to recognize legitimate e-mail even more accurately than it recognizes spam. This was done because organizations need their legitimate e-mail even more than they need Spam blocked.

   PerfectMail is unique in that it ensures that legitimate e-mail is correctly handled every time.

2. E-mail Addresses Belong on My WebSite

   Websites and e-mail addresses are tools for conducting business. You want to make it easy for customers and prospects to contact you so you provide them with the information to do so.

   Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from web sites and barrage those addresses with unwanted e-mail. As a result, many organizations omit legitimate e-mail addresses or only include generic e-mail addresses such as info@xpmsoftware.com on their sites.

   PerfectMail makes it safe to put real e-mail addresses back on your website. Spammers will still find you, they just won't be able to spam you.

   Here's a great test. Visit any competitors web site and see if you can find e-mail links. If you can't, what is the vendor telling you about the effectiveness of their product?

3. Mail Servers Must be Protected

   E-Mail is a business-critical communications tool and must be protected. But, Mail Servers are under constant attack from Spammers, hackers and others who would co-opt your server and turn it into a Spam or Virus zombie.

   Furthermore, our customers told us that they don't want to install additional software on their Mail Servers because they don't want to add an extra load onto expensive and possibly overworked servers.

   Customers asked us to block malicious and unwanted traffic before it reaches their corporate Mail Server (so that Mail Servers are not put at risk). By blocking unwanted traffic, corporate Mail Servers are free to use their resources to handle more users and more legitimate e-mail, rather than filtering spam.

4. The Best Place to Stop Spam is at the Edge of Your Network

   Malicious e-mail activity poses a significant risk to your company's e-mail infrastructure, so the sooner unwanted activity is blocked, the better. There are three places within your organization where you can stop unwanted e-mail activity:
   • Edge of the Network
     PerfectMail appliances stop this traffic at the edge of your network (where it should be stopped). Unwanted traffic is not permitted inside your corporate network - keeping your mail servers and desktops free of this malicious network traffic.

   • E-Mail Server
     Server based solutions let malicious e-mail traffic reach your critical mail server(s) and then attempt to block unwanted activity before it causes harm. Your E-Mail Server is exposed to all SMTP traffic so your mail server is put at significant risk.

     E-Mail Server hosted antispam and antivirus solutions rob your mail server of resources that could be used to serve more e-mail users. The reduction in e-mail and user capacity that result from this additional load become a hidden cost of this type of deployment.

     Finally, there is always a risk that 3^rd party software installed on your Mail Server may de-stabilize your server, resulting in e-mail service interruptions.

   • Desktop
     This is the worst place to try to stop Spam. Installing Antispam software on desktops is expensive and time consuming (as each PC must be updated individually). But, the biggest problem with Desktop Antispam solutions is that unwanted e-mail has traveled completely through your e-mail infrastructure, has landed on a desktop and only then is it intercepted and deleted.

5. Vendor Neutral Solutions are Best

   PerfectMail appliances can protect any Mail Server from the risks of malicious E-Mail. PerfectMail complies with the industry standard Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), ensuring broad compatibility with all popular mail servers including:
   • Microsoft Exchange™
   • Lotus Domino/Notes™
   • Novell GroupWise™
   • Sendmail™
   • QMail™
   • Communigate Pro™
   • and many more

   Furthermore, PerfectMail does not require any software installs on corporate Mail Servers or on user destops, so implementing PerfectMail is fast, easy and fully transparent to your user community.

6. Commercial E-Mail Is Important, Bulk E-Mail Is Not

   The real threat to organizations is Unsolicited Bulk E-Mail (UBE), not Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE). UBE e-mail, and activities related to UBE e-mail must be blocked.

   UCE is simply e-mail of a commercial nature. The sender is trying to solicit business from the recipient so the senders identity is easily determined. Ethical UBE mass mailers will never barrage you with e-mail and will honor opt-out requests.

   UBE is e-mail where the sender has gone out of their way to hide themselves from the recipient. This usually involves submitting false information to your mail server. UBE spammers may misrepresent any or all of

   • Sending Mail Server and IP address
   • Senders e-mail address
   • Nature of the e-mail (altered or misleading subject line)
   • Intentional obfuscation of text in either the subject line or mail message. For example, V1@Gra is an intentional obfuscation of Viagra. (PerfectMail would correctly identify the intended word!)

   UBE mass mailers never honor opt-out requests. In fact, when you opt-out of a UBE mailing list, all you do is confirm the validity of your e-mail address. This ensures that you will continue to receive UBE spam.

   PerfectMail was designed to be particularly effective in blocking UBE.

7. Unethical, Immoral and Illegal Content Should be Blocked

   Staff must be free to conduct business withhout the risk of exposure to unwanted content that is immoral, illegal or unethical. In fact, new labor laws put the burden of responsibility on the employer to ensure that the workplace is safe for all staff.

   At XPMsoftware, we know that majority of UBE spam includes or makes reference to content that is either Immoral, Unethical and/or promotes activities that may be illegal. As a result, we developed PerfectMail to aggressively identify and eliminate UBE spam.

8. Employee Time is Precious and Must be Protected
   Administrator and end-User time is precious. PerfectMail must function accurately and effectively without the need for Administrator or User intervention.

   Many competing antispam solutions trade off user time for administrator time. Instead of dealing with spam, you waste your time dealing with quarantines, training the antispam filter, updating black & white lists and endlessly adjusting user settings. PerfectMail eliminates these tasks. With Adaptive Learning, PerfectMail doesn't need Black & White lists. PerfectMail doesn't use quarantines and the administrator interface quick and simple to use.

   We did all of this because, antispam solution that requires as much time to configure, train and administer it as you would spend deleting spam - is not much of a solution.

9. E-Mail Must be Measured and Managed

   PerfectMail includes reporting and drill-down tools that lets management know exactly whats going on. Not only does Perfectmail report on its own effectiveness, PerfectMail will let you see e-mail activity:
   • Site Wide You'll be able to see how much traffic your server handled - and how much it stopped.
   • By Domain PerfectMail can host many domains. Traffic by domain can vary widely. Our first level drill-down will let you see which domains use e-mail the most.
   • By Employee PerfectMail automatically learns all valid recipients within your organization. The next level drill-down lets you see activity (both send and receive) by staff member.
   • By E-Mail Peer PerfectMail lets you drill-down even further so that you can see all of the mail peers of a staff member. Use this drill-down to see who is using e-mail effectively and who is wasting company time with personal e-mails. By Subject PerfectMail will quickly and accurately provide management with reports that include the subject line of each e-mail exchanged between two e-mail peers.

     In fact, PerfectMail lets administrators review history between e-mail peers (including the subject lines) for a minimum of three months.

   With PerfectMail, you can monitor your investement in E-Mail Infrastructure and ensure that you are getting solid ROI.

10. Freedom to Choose the Right Hardware

    Many competitors limit your deployment options by selling underpowered appliances. A typical consequence of this strategy is that the appliance you purchase is not capable of filtering e-mail for the number of users you license. The result; traffic slows down as e-mail waits its turn at the filter.

    With PerfectMail, you have the freedom to deploy our software on the hardware of your choice. We offer a complete line of entry level to enterprise platforms to meet any need. But, you can also deploy PerfectMail on any platform that is RedHat 9.0 and/or Fedora Core 3.0 compatible so you can deploy on IBM, Dell and HP/Compaq servers to take advantage of both existing purchase agreements (you may have) and the exceptional service offered by these vendors.

    We work with you and your vendors. We never limit your hardware deployment choices.