How SpamGoblin Works

Fast and Easy Setup

At SpamGoblin, our motto is "it goes in dirty and comes out clean" and that's the truth. When you sign up for SpamGoblin you will be sending all of your email to our filters first, so we absorb the brunt of all of your email, and we filter it and only send the cleaned emails to your email server. Not only are we providing a filtering service, we also provide redundancy as well. If your email server or internet connection goes down, we will keep the email for 4 days until you are able to get your email server back online. This is a great backup plan.

How does it work? When you sign up for the SpamGoblin service, you will need to change the MX (Mail Exchanger) record in your DNS Zone to point to our filtering service. You will then need to provide the IP address of your email server, so we can deliver all the clean emails there. As an extra level of security you can change your email server to only accept connections from our secured ip range. This will ensure that the ONLY email you are able to receive is clean filtered, SpamGoblin emails.

Spam Filtering

Solving The Problem of Spam. In order to win the war against spam, businesses must evolve their spam defenses faster than spammers evolve their techniques.

Our Spam Filtering Solution accomplishes this by gathering real-time spam intelligence from a number of sources and then actively using this intelligence to block the spam. We track tens of thousands of live spam email signatures which alone identify the majority of spam. In addition, a number of third-party spam databases, several DNS checks, and several message-formatting tests are used when analyzing each email. We also have a staff of highly trained individuals who manually comb emails to ensure that we are providing the best filtering solution possible.

We aggregate all of this data into a collection of several thousand constantly evolving spam tests that are performed on every email that enters the email hosting system. The results of these tests are combined together to identify more than 98% of spam with virtually zero false-positives.

Virus Scanning

Restricted Attachments Emails are searched for dangerous types of file attachments. Dangerous files are those that contain executable code, which can be used by malicious persons to spread viruses or do harm to your computer. Restricted file types include, but are not limited to program files (.exe, .com), script modules and files (.bas, .vbs, .js), Internet links (.url, .ins), and shortcuts to files (.lnk, .pif). When an email is sent or received that contains a restricted file attachment, the email is rejected and the sender receives a "bounced" email notification informing them of the restriction. This is useful to notify the person sending the email there might be a problem.

Normalization This stage searches for email formatting vulnerabilities that can be used by viruses to hide from virus scanners. If any vulnerability is found, our system corrects the formatting of the message so that it can be thoroughly scanned for viruses. This is called "normalizing" the message, and most notably this process protects against all known Microsoft Outlook security threats.

Decompression Next, if the email contains any compressed attachments such as zip files, the compressed attachments are temporarily unzipped so that the contents can be scanned for viruses. Many of today's viruses use compression as a way to sneak their way past virus scanners. This elevates that risk. If the attachment cannot be decompressed, such as the case with password protected zip files, the original file is scanned for virus signatures that occur in compressed attachments.