What Businesses Need to Know About Reputation-Based Messaging Technology

From: The Essentials Series: IT Compliance - Volume II

By: Rebecca Herold

An Overview of Messaging Filtering

Email security and annoyances have been plaguing organizations since email left the mainframe and dumb-terminal-only view and started residing on distributed mail servers, communicating with anyone who wants to send messages from outside the enterprise network. One of the first types of malicious and annoying email messages that started to occur was spamming. It was soon followed by fraud schemes, then phishing. Security has been trying to keep up with all the new and clever ways to get around the protections that organizations implement to try and keep spam and related types of malicious messages from entering the enterprise network.

Some messaging filtering methods work better than others. Some worked fantastically well when first introduced, but then the evolution of spamming methods soon outdated the once wonderful spam fighter. When new message-filtering solutions are rolled out, the spammers adjust their spam delivery methods to defeat the filters. What messaging security methods have been used? Table 1 provides a brief overview.