The Mistral Anti-Spam Anti-Virus service enables users to achieve a significant reduction in unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) and e-mail borne viruses, thus saving valuable bandwidth and time.

The Spam filtering service is based on set of generic filters that check specific spam and virus signatures and heuristic analysis use to ascertain whether or not an e-mail message is Spam.   Using the various layers of filters and analysis the probability of each message being spam is evaluated, in the event of it being deemed to be spam it is quarantined.  All other email continues through the system and is passed for final delivery.

Quarantine Digests are sent to mail users, these contain details of the emails placed into the quarantine, links within the digest emails can be used to retrieve e-mail incorrectly identified as spam (also known as “false positives”).  Extensive testing has proven the solution to be highly accurate in it’s analysis with a very low rate of false positives.  However no system can be 100% accurate in identifying spam due to the nature of the problem, we are therefore always interested to hear of false positives to aid us in improving the overall performance of the solution.

The virus scanning service guards against malicious code spreading via email, virus definition information is updated every 15 minutes keeping the window of exposure to a minimum. Virus mails are quarantined in the same way as spam, allowing the user to check for genuine mails via the e-mail digest. Quarantined data is held for 5 days.

Email anti-spam & anti-virus

Any e-mail which the filtering system identifies as being spam will be automatically quarantined.  At periodic intervals, the system will send a quarantine digest, listing the subject line and sender of any e-mails which it has quarantined on your behalf.  The quarantine digest listings are sent out once a day starting in the early hours of the morning.  An example of one such listing is shown below.