Message analysis
Katharion’s industry-leading technology for detecting junk email is the result of thousands of hours of development and the company’s experience from processing billions of messages.
Katharion uses numerous traditional techniques for spam detection in combination with a variety of next-generation approaches for message analysis. Within this wide spectrum of tests, generally no single element will by itself classify a message as spam – thus avoiding the false positives associated with simpler approaches – while the breadth of analysis results in an industry-leading detection rate for junk email.
Katharion’s technology for analyzing messages includes elements such as:
- Authenticity Checks including detailed header analysis, SMTP conversation details, message encoding and formatting, and other characteristics
- Message Fingerprinting to compare email signatures to frequently-updated public and internal databases of known spam messages
- An extensive, continually updated Heuristic Rule Set that encompasses message headers, body text, and other characteristics of both English-language and non-English messages
- Public and Private Blacklists of mail servers, relays, or networks known to be used by spammers
- Extensive URI Databases of unique elements such as URLs, phone numbers, and physical addresses known to be used by spammers
- Incorporation of Domain History and Reputation to increase the accuracy of blacklists and URI databases
- A self-learning Bayesian Engine that analyzes patterns of phrases in messages, and assigns mathematical probabilities for the presence of those phrases in junk mail versus legitimate mail
- Real-Time Message Source Analysis to assess whether an increased volume of mail flow is simply a legitimate high-volume mailing, or the result of a spammer hijacking or the use of a ‘zombie’ network
- Dynamic Feedback-Based Rules Optimization to leverage feedback from thousands of Katharion users as well as from many monitored legitimate and ‘spam trap’ email addresses
- User-Based Message Profiling that allows for refinement of message scoring for each user based on a history of his or her message traffic
- Customizable whitelists and blacklists which can be applied on an account-wide, organization-wide, domain-wide, or user-specific basis
Working together, these elements accurately detect a very high percentage of spam, phishing emails, and other unwanted messages – while minimizing the chances of a legitimate message being detected as spam.
Next: Read about Katharion’s flexible handling of detected email threats.
