Spam mutates at an ever-increasing rate, and the volume of spam is already more than the volume of legitimate e-mail. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, is a productivity-sapping, resource-draining threat to business collaboration. To combat the increasingly sophisticated techniques employed by spammers, organizations need to fight spam with a multi-layered approach that combines a broad range of techniques to turn spam’s own objectives, characteristics, and defenses against itself.

Ipswitch Collaboration Suite stops spam and reduces false positives with a range of different strategies, such as:

• Premium Anti-Spam powered by Mail-Filters
  Using a unique approach combining machine and human intelligence, ICS Premium Anti-Spam stops spam and virtually eliminates false positives with a single click. ICS Premium Anti-Spam is available with the Premium and ISP/EDU Editions only.
  
  
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to combat Phishing attacks
  Sender Policy Framework is an extension to the DNS system that enables stronger authentication of the source of a message. ICS now supports SPF to reduce the incidence of “Phishing” attacks where spam messages pose as legitimate correspondence to trick users into giving up passwords and personal information.
  
  
• Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBLs)
  These lists use third-party services that include domain names and IP addresses of known spammers to block spam.
  
  
• Advanced HTML Filtering
  This technology enables ICS to defeat attempts by spammers to use HTML formatting tricks to bypass simple content filters. It removes HTML tags and comments prior to the statistical analysis of the words in the message, and detects a wide range of other formatting tactics including broken MIME headers.

• Bayesian statistical filters
  Over time, these filters “learn” to separate spam from legitimate mail by continuously analyzing incoming messages and identifying the phrases and attributes that characterize spam.
  
  
• Kill Lists
  Kill lists enable you to block spam coming from specific domains or email addresses.

• Trusted IP Addresses and White Lists
  These lists of trusted e-mail addresses or IP addresses minimize false positives.
  Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.0 or later

These techniques are applied at multiple levels including connection filtering, SMTP filtering, content filtering and delivery rules. In addition to blocking e-mail spam, ICS puts a stop to annoying instant messaging spam too, because the IM namespace and user list is completely under your control.