CONTACT:
Eric Wilde
BSM Development
44 Whitewood Circle
Norwood, MA 02062
Phone: 781-551-0153x600
Web: http://www.bsmdevelopment.com
Email: info@bsmdevelopment.com
Email Filter Validation Suite Has Archiver Support
Norwood, MA -- March 4, 2009 -- BSM Development (www.bsmdevelopment.com) announces that the latest release of their Email Filter Validation Suite, a set of specially-crafted test email messages meant to verify the operation of mail filter programs, for use with all MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents) and available for download from the company's Web site, now contains support for third-party archiving systems in the form of a selection of bounceback messages that should be filtered by any filter that supports third-party archivers.
Third-party archivers usually work by sending messages to be archived to an archive program through regular email delivery channels. The MTA that is archiving its messages makes a copy of each message, alters the "To:" address to point to the archive program and injects the message into the regular email delivery stream. All well and good, providing the archive program stays alive and makes itself available. However, should it become unavailable (e.g. through a network failure), the regular email delivery stream necessitates that a bounceback message be generated. Since the "From:" address of the duplicated message is not usually altered (in the interests of archiving accuracy), the bounceback goes back to the original sender of the message. This probably comes as a huge surprise to them.
A good email filter (such as BSM Development's MailCorral) will silently delete bounceback messages from the third-party archiver so as not to confuse the original message sender. The new messages, included in the latest release of the Email Filter Validation Suite, are meant to test an email filter's abiltiy to handle a number of different bounceback messages from various MTAs.
Other additions included in the latest release of the Email Filter Validation Suite are a number of malformed messages that have been shown to cause problems with several email filters, additional spam test messages, representative of current spam "technology" and new virus examples, including a real, but none-the-less harmless, actual virus in several forms. Detection of and/or proper handling of these test messages should be a requirement for all email filters.
The Email Filter Validation Suite is a collection of specially-crafted email messages that are meant to be used in validating the operation of email filters of all kinds. The suite includes a set of malformed messages that test the filter's ability to cope with pathological cases that should be rejected, according to the mail standard, but are often read by many mail clients. Since the email filter should be able to filter anything the client will read, it must be able to cope with these messages. The suite also includes a comprehensive sampling of spam, in order to test the filter's spam classification capabilities, and a representative sampling of virus-containing messages, in order to test the filter's ability to block mail with viral loads.
In addition to the Email Filter Validation Suite, BSM Development also offers the mail handling products MailCorral, SpamCorral and an Email Redirector.
MailCorral filters mail delivered to Unix and Linux systems via the standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) interface, through sendmail, the MTA. It watches all mail traffic entering the system and inspects it for the presence of harmful viruses and annoying spam. It detects and renders harmless the viruses as well as identifying and sidelining the spam. It can forward mail to third-party archivers or it can archive the mail directly, itself in the local file tree. MailCorral contains built-in spam and virus identification routines but can also seamlessly invoke third party spam and virus identifiers such as Spamassassin and ClamAv to classify spam and detect viruses. Several methods of handling messages that contain spam and/or viruses are provided.
SpamCorral sends a notification message to each spam recipient, once a day (or more frequently if you choose), showing them all of the spam that they would have received in the past day and listing its details. The recipient has the option of replying to the notification, to request that specific pieces of spam be remailed to them or ignoring it altogether. The annoyance of dealing with spam is kept to a very short amount of time and only happens once a day. If the recipient ignores the notification, the spam is silently deleted by SpamCorral. In a typical case, the spam recipient spends twenty or thirty seconds a day dealing with all of their received spam, most of which is deleted automatically. However, those one or two important pieces that were accidetally misidentified as spam will not be lost or left to languish in the spam folder.
For more information about these
products, see the company's products Web page,
http://www.bsmdevelopment.com/Products/,
email
info@bsmdevelopment.com
or phone 781-551-0153x600.