Getting to know DNI Mail Complete By Jake Winemiller January 2007 In our newsletter a couple weeks ago, we introduced you to DNI Mail Complete,  and some of you have already been experiencing the benefits of the new system as beta testers or the first waves of clients taking the system test drive. Now, it’s time to learn a little bit more about this system, how it works, and how to take advantage of your DNI Mail Complete daily digest reports. As you all know, spam has been on of the fastest growing and most concerning problems on the Internet. While we’ve tried our best to fight spam with the tools at our disposal, it’s been a losing battle. Especially over the last few months, when spam has nearly doubled to nearly 90% of all email online. One thing we’d like to make perfectly clear is while our new system includes elements of our past spam fighting methods that have worked well, it’s a completely new system that has eliminated many (if not all) of the previous methods that have not worked as we’d hoped. This system is one of the most advanced out there and we hope you’ll enjoy it! How does DNI Mail Complete protect my inbox? First and foremost, DNI Mail Complete works to protect your inbox from dangerous viruses/worms and with two proactively updated virus filters both scrubbing your mail before it hits your inbox, you’ll be safer than ever. While we would never recommend abandoning your own in-house anti-virus products, we hope they won’t have to spring into action thanks to the dual mail scrubbing feature in DNI Mail Complete. How does DNI Mail Complete work on preventing spam? Your mailboxes are protected by 4 layers of active and passive spam filtering that will be described below: 1. Hardware Firewall Our hardware firewall resides in front of your server cluster and protects against hackers and spammers by blocking their IP addresses from accessing either the web or mail servers. We’re very careful to block as few IP addresses as we can (only blocking IP addresses that have attacked or maliciously scanned our network) and we hope this layer will not only keep your critical business information safe, but protect from some spammers as well. 2. Dual Layer Anti-Virus Protection Our dual layer anti-spam protection scans every message for viruses and worms twice, scrubs them, and blocks them from entering your inbox. Virus definitions are updated constantly and while one may slip through every so often, it’s been very successful to date in protecting your inboxes from a disastrous virus or worm taking control of your computer. 3. Hardware RBL blocking RBL stands for “Real-time Black hole List” and are lists of spammer IP addresses. There are thousands of RBLs out there (public publicly and privately managed) and we’ve chosen the very best, most accurate lists out there to remove spam before it hits your mailbox. When spam is reported to these lists, the IP addresses that sent the spam are added to the databases and allow us to scrub the messages so they don’t end up cluttering your inbox. This is one of the most effective ways we can prevent offensive and annoying spam from taking up your valuable time and resources. 4. DNI Mail Complete Signature Email Scrubbing This step takes all mail that has passed through the previous filters and subjects it to the virtual eyeball test. With many thousands of signatures, our system looks at each messages to see if it matches the look or profile of current and past batches of spam that have been hitting servers around the world. These signatures are updates every 5 minutes to make sure they are staying on top of the latest spammer trends and keeping as much spam as possible out of your inbox. Quarantine Reports Now that you’ve had a chance to review a brief synopsis of the methods behind the filtering system, I’m sure you’re wondering: “What are these Daily Digest reports I’ve been receiving?” The daily digest reports consist of 3 main parts - The Virus Quarantine, The General Quarantine, and the Junk Quarantine. The Virus quarantine is self explanatory- it holds messages in which we’ve found a virus. The messages are scrubbed clean and quarantined for your safety and convenience. The General Quarantine is a list of messages that have been trapped by our hardware RBL filtering system because the message came from an IP contained in one of our spammer databases. The Junk Quarantine contains messages that were caught by our signature scrubbing. These messages includes patterns known to be common in mass spam mailings and are updated every 5 minutes for up-to-the-minute accuracy. These reports are gathered and once every day, the quarantine digest report is sent to each email box on your domain so every single user gets a chance to see the messages that have been blocked and review the blocked messages to make sure none of your valuable email or clients have been caught in the filter. This step in the process puts control in YOUR hands to make sure you don’t miss any mail that could be important to you! In order to get a view a message that has been quarantined, simply click the “View” link next to the message to see a copy online. If the message is valid, simply click “Release” to have the message delivered. It’s that simple! You’ll also notice that message caught in the “Junk” quarantine include a link to “Release and Report”. This option not only releases the message to your inbox, but also sends our technicians a copy of the message so we can update the spam catching signatures to more accurately scrub messages in the future. Each time you click the “Release and Report” link, you’re helping to make your spam filtering even MORE accurate! Finally, you always have the option to completely white list an email address so it never gets caught in any of the filters again - no matter what! If one of your valued clients or business associates gets trapped in the Junk or General quarantine and you want to make sure it never happens again, simply email support @ dynamicnet.net and include your domain name along with the email address you’d like us to white list. We’ll white list the address and confirm with you via email immediately. While no spam prevention method will ever be prefect, we’re striving every day to make sure your email boxes are clean as possible. We will never stop in our quest to improve, but based on feedback from our beta testers, we believe this is a giant leap in spam prevention that will be of great value to all our web and email hosting clients! Stay tuned for more information via our newsletters, but if you have any questions or comments please feel free to call us at 1-888-887-6727 or email us at support @ dynamicnet.net We hope your 2007 is off to an amazing start and we thank you for your continued business and support!