Adium Software Inc.

Products Trust-E-Mail Overview


	Products
	Trust-E-Mail
	Overview
	Benefits
	Requirements
	FAQ

Overview

The Problem

In recent years, spam or unsolicited advertising has become a major problem for organizations of all sizes. Latests research shows that spam costs businesses $13 billion annually. The contributing factors to this figure are numerous:

Lost productivity
Increased bandwidth consumption
Loss of legitimate information

To solve this ever-growing problem, there are various off-the-shelf and bundled solutions. The vast majority of these solutions utilize content filtering techniques to automatically determine the likelihood of unsolicited content in e-mail messages. This approach, however, is inherently flawed:

Not 100% effective in stopping spam
Loss of legitimate messages
Significant user intervention required to keep filters up to date and to double-check software decisions

Our Solution

At Adium Software, we have approached this problem from a completely different perspective. We make no attempt to analyze message content in any way. We have decided to focus on the concept of trust. Our solution aims to verify the sender of each message by way of a very simple 3-point protocol:

The Originator sends an E-mail message.
Our software checks whether the Originator is trusted, and if they are not then a confirmation message is sent to verify the Originator’s identity.
If the Originator responds to our confirmation message then the original e-mail is delivered, and the Originator becomes a trusted entity. All future messages are accepted without verification.

This approach guarantees no false positives and no false negatives at the cost of a one-time, minimal burden to the Originator. Since mass mailers are not able to verify themselves, and the originating addresses for spam messages are generally forged, this approach offers a rather reliable guarantee that the message originator is a real human being, not a mass-mailer. Furthermore, any valid addresses that abuse the company e-mail policy can be easily blocked.