Unwanted email, also known as spam, fills the average Inbox at an astonishing rate. A large volume of spam decreases bandwidth, degrades employee productivity, and wastes network resources. The WatchGuard spamBlocker option uses industry-leading pattern detection technology from Commtouch to block spam at your Internet gateway and keep it away from your email server.
Commercial mail filters use many methods to find spam. Blacklists keep a list of domains that are used by known spam sources or are open relays for spam. Content filters search for key words in the header and body of the email message. URL detection compares a list of domains used by known spam sources to the advertised link in the body of the email message. However, all of these procedures scan each individual email message. Attackers can easily bypass those fixed algorithms. They can mask the sender address to bypass a blacklist, change key words, embed words in an image, or use multiple languages. They can also create a chain of proxies to disguise the advertised URL.
spamBlocker uses the Recurrent-Pattern Detection (RPD) solution created by Commtouch to detect these hard-to-find spam attacks. RPD is an innovative method that searches the Internet for spam outbreaks in real time. RPD finds the patterns of the outbreak, not only the pattern of individual spam messages. Because it does not use the content or header of a message, it can identify spam in any language, format, or encoding. To see an example of real-time spam outbreak analysis, visit the Commtouch Outbreak Monitor at: http://www.commtouch.com/Site/ResearchLab/map.asp
spamBlocker also provides optional virus outbreak detection functionality. For more information, see Enable and Set Parameters for Virus Outbreak Detection (VOD) .
To see statistics on current spamBlocker activity, select Dashboard > Subscription Services.