Technology Overview   StarEngine   Bullet Signature Database   Technology FAQ   Technology Whitepaper (.pdf)   The Human-Touch Whitepaper (.pdf)   Products Brochure (.pdf)   Bullet Signature Database Overview Bullet Signatures Mail-Filters Bullet Signatures are small, targeted, lethal spam signatures handcrafted by human editors and other proprietary technology. Bullet signatures are constantly updated to maintain effectiveness and accuracy. Sources Mail-Filters collects spam from many different sources. In fact, a significant amount of the spam comes from real customers working to help themselves and the community at large to get rid of spam. As a result, Mail-Filter's technology actually gets better and better as more customers us it. The Problem with Honeypots Many competitive solutions use honeypots (or a PROBE network), to gather spam. The theory is that spammers will scan the Internet for email addresses, and then use those addresses to spam. A couple of years ago, this was very true, but now if you use only honeypots to collect spam, you are missing a significant portion of available spam because spammers gather email addresses in many different ways. These include: - Spiders that gather email addresses found on websites and newsgroups. This type of email address is the least desirable to spammers. - Dictionary attacks that find email user addresses by sending messages to a company using common email names, then tallying the bounced messages. If they send 1000 and 985 bounced, they know they have 15 good email accounts. - email addresses that are found or purchased from companies or individuals that have a list of legitimate email addresses, either by doing business with them or enticing someone into giving them their email address. Conclusion, the honeypot technique collects only one type of spam. If a spammer doesn't use names gathered by spiders, the honeypot will never see it and the filter that depends on honeypots is defeated. Why Human Editors are Important Trained editors can figure out if a message is spam or not. While most messages are obvious, it takes training to figure out if a message was solicited. For example, is an industry newsletter spam? Mail-Filters human editors are specifically trained to properly identify email that is or is not spam. Some technologies use a community of humans to identify spam or spammers and have a system that automatically apprises the community of this determination. The problem has been that these individuals are not properly trained to determine what is or isn't spam. As a result a person, not affiliated with you in any way, can end up causing a significant number of false-positives for you. Click here for the white paper, "Spam filters need the human touch". How Bullet Signatures are Created Bullet signatures are crafted from different attributes of a message. Our editors and proprietary technology look for the specific combination of attributes that will enable the signature to catch not only a specific Spam message, but a wide range of future Spam messages. Since the Mail-Filters team is comprised of highly trained experts, using the most advanced technology, you can expect the results of the Bullet signatures to be very accurate. In fact, our guarantee of fewer than 1 in 1,000,000 false-positives and over 95% coverage tells you that the Mail-Filters Bullet signatures are accurate. How Mail-Filters' Bullet Signatures are Different Signature-based solutions are accurate but they only identify known spam. Mail-Filters Bullet signature system is significantly different from other signature systems. Other signature-based (or "Fingerprint") systems use a checksum or hash value that is calculated based on the characters and where they are in the message. The exact same messages will have exactly the same checksums. Mail-Filters does NOT use checksums or hash values in Bullet signatures. Combined with the StarEngine, spammer can attempt a wide range of tricks to defeat checksums and they will have no effect on Bullet Signatures. Updates to the Database The Bullet Signature database is updated as often as once a minute to maintain effectiveness and accuracy.

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