Mirapoint’s spam-blocking technology

Mirapoint last week introduced its Full-Spectrum e-mail security technology, a spam-blocking system provided as part of Mirapoint’s messaging server and security offerings, or as a stand-alone product.

Mirapoint’s system provides a number of interesting features, including:

* End user control of spam protection that allows users to set up their own blocked-senders lists, whitelists and unique rules for filtering spam, and to establish their own thresholds for determining what is spam. Also, the Mirapoint system can label a message as spam so that client-side filters can be used to eliminate it, a feature that may be very useful with newer e-mail clients.

* Heuristic analysis of incoming messages that analyzes various facets of each message and assigns it overall score. A message can then be handled in a variety of ways based on that score, and attachments can automatically be removed from a message.

* Incoming flow control based on monitoring of mail sent from specific IP addresses. This allows the system to either reduce the flow of incoming mail from a specific IP address that might be the source of spam, or to block all incoming mail from the address. This feature is particularly useful for preventing directory-harvest attacks.

* Outgoing message control that allows an administrator to determine if internal users are forging e-mail addresses or acting as spammers in some way.

* Flexible security alerting that notifies IT staff if a denial-of-service attack or spam bombardment is underway. These security alerts are useful for detecting anomalies in outgoing or incoming message traffic.

Mirapoint claims that its technology can stop 96% of spam with a very low false positive rate. Mirapoint’s offering can be deployed in front of Exchange, Domino or other servers via the Message Director appliance for those customers that do not use the company’s messaging server.

Mirapoint’s offering is interesting because its feature set is indicative of the newest generation of spam-blocking tools: good end-user controls, multiple methods for detecting and blocking spam, and real-time identification of threats like directory-harvest attacks.