Anti-Spam Protection

Firegate offers protection against unsolicited commercial emails (UCE) by stopping messages that arrive via POP3 and/or SMTP data streams. Spamwall uses a mixture of various uniquely integrated mechanisms to filter out spam from the mail stream. The primary filter is a challenge/response mechanism that can alter its behavior depending on the results of other content analysis filters.

Firegate’s Spamwall filter permits spam protection to be individually enabled or disabled for individual email addresses and POP3 accounts. Individual configuration settings, notification messages, and filter preferences can be managed for each protected account via the primary Web administration interface or via each user’s Spamwall account interface. 

Messages identified as spam are placed into the spam queue, where they sit for up to 7 days before being silently erased. When a message is placed into the spam queue, the respective sender is always notified and given a chance to respond in order to ensure that no false positives occur. When messages expire from the spam queue, they are assumed to be unwanted junk and are passed through the Bayesian learning engine as examples of spam.

Likewise, messages from senders who are found on the protected recipient’s acceptlist are automatically passed through the Bayesian learning engine as examples of non-spam. 

Spamwall provides acceptlists and blocklists for both the individual user account and the global account. Email addresses as well as domain names may be manually entered into the accept/block lists in order to pre-populate them with known bad and good addresses. For example, each user’s address book may be exported to a text comma separated value (CSV) file, copied to the clipboard, and pasted into the user’s acceptlist input field. Spamwall intelligently extracts the email addresses from all of the given text, and adds new addresses to the acceptlist. Duplicate addresses are ignored.