Our Services: Fighting Spam

Filtering spam e-mails is a legally sensitive area. Being covered by the German "Briefgeheimnis" law, e-mails must not be modified or rewritten. However, this is exactly what happens, according to German law enforcement, when we e.g. prepend the "***SPAM***" tag to an e-mail%27s subject line.

Our spam filter simply rejects e-mails which do not conform to valid standards. The sender is then informed about this action and its cause.

Additionally, the sending mail server receives notice to try sending again later. All of this only happens on the first occurrence of a sender/recipient combination. Merely five minutes later, and the delivery of the e-mail is being allowed. The sender/recipient combination is then saved for 60 days. After that, the process starts all over again.

This mechanism (greylisting) by itself, reduces the spam amount by more than 95%.

The remaining e-mails are then subjected to a spam and virus scan, potentially present viruses are removed and a note reporting the removal is attached to the e-mail.

As with any other automated processing there is no absolute security.

E-mails which are not spam, but possibly contain some similarities to spam, are marked in a way that does not change the actual e-mail%27s textual content while maintaining the ability to filter it (Tag in the e-mail header).

Our system will never silently delete an e-mail. Either the sender is notified of his e-mail not being delivered or it is still delivered, but with a mark to ease the classification as possible spam.