spam protection

After significant research, development and testing, the team at ecosse.net are pleased to announce the introduction of our new CAlligate Spam and Adult content filtering service.This is one of the most advanced email filtering services available and incorporates Alligate developed by Solid Oak Software.
The CAlligate Spam filtering service is supplied free of all charges for ecosse.net users.

What will happen to my email ?

The filtering service assesses incoming email, identifies suspected Spam or Adult mail messages and holds them in a message store; email that passes these tests is delivered directly to your mailbox. Each day the CAlligate servers will send you a Digest of all held Spam and Adult mails addressed to you. You can then select from this digest any emails you wish to receive. You can also "whitelist" a sender if you always want to receive mail from them regardless of the content.

What you need to do

Read your daily digest, and follow the Message Retrieval Instructions...that's all.

How it works

The filtering service uses advanced pattern matching and adaptive heuristics to perform numerous tests on each message for telltale "spam signatures". These tests calculate a Spam or Adult "probability factor" score which is then used in addition to the pattern matching techniques to identify unsolicited messages.

As well as this the service also records or "fingerprints" all known spam addresses and the IP addresses of the sending servers and uses these "fingerprints" to Tarpit or slow down connections from these addresses.

Spammers try to send thousands of emails at a time and Tarpitting can slow their connections down to such an extent that they eventually time out, disconnect and hopefully never bother any of us again.

Whitelisting

The service is self learning but can also be taught, initially you may find that some mesages are indentified as spam when infact they are not. Often mesages from Lists or friends that use "colourful language" can be incorrectly categorised however this is simple to put right. All you need to do when replying to a Digest is to tell the service that this is a trusted sender and then all future mail from that sender will be passed directly to your mailbox. The service maintains individual "whitelists" for each user so is very configurable.

How long is mail held ?

Any mail that is not requested from a Digest is deleted from the system after 14 days.

How good is the service at assessing Spam and Adult mail ?

In our trials we have found that this service is stopping over 90% of unsolicited mail which in turn saves you time and bandwidth.

Can I request a Digest ?

Although Digests will be sent daily, you can also request them at any time by sending an email, with the
Subject Line: Send Digest
addressed to: request@digest1.ecosse.net