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At least 99.4% of spam blocked in recent Virus Bulletin test

February 2014 by Marc Jacob

Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body, has
announced the results of its latest anti-spam comparative
review: all 18 solutions that were tested were found to block at
least 99.4% of all spam - although some struggled with false
positive issues.

The VBSpam tests don’t just look at products’ ability to prevent
spam from making it to users’ inboxes, they also measure how
well products perform when it comes to not blocking legitimate
emails.

There, the results were more of a mixed bag: five solutions
didn’t block any legitimate emails at all - and as they also
blocked more than 99.5% of all spam, they were awarded a VBSpam+
award. However, for three solutions, the amount of legitimate
email that they blocked was so high that they failed to achieve
VBSpam certification.

"I was really pleased to see such high spam catch rates," said
VB’s Anti-Spam Test Director, Martijn Grooten. "There are still
billions of spam emails sent every day, many of which come with
a malicious payload. It is good to know that almost all of these
are stopped before they reach the user’s inbox."

Grooten continued: "Of course, it was disappointing to see that
for some products the high catch rate came at the cost of
blocking quite a few legitimate emails. We hope that these
products will see their performance improve in the next test."

The report also surveyed the participants’ use of DMARC. DMARC
is a specification intended to prevent email abuse: it allows
the owners of often-spoofed domains to state what receivers
should do with emails that fail SPF and DKIM checks.

While the majority of participating products check the SPF
status and DKIM signatures of incoming emails, at the moment
very few are using DMARC: only one out of the 18 products sends
feedback, while another checks the DMARC status of incoming
emails, but doesn’t send feedback.

The VBSpam quadrant plots products’ spam catch rate against
their false positive rate, with the top right-hand corner the
area products should be aiming for (with maximum spam catch rate
and minimum false positive rate). The front-runners in this test
can clearly be seen from their positions on the quadrant at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/charts/vbspam-chart-0114-1200.jpg
(journalists are permitted to reproduce this chart unedited).

The results of the January 2014 anti-spam comparative review can
be seen at http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/archive/test?id=194

The full review, including detailed results tables and analysis,
is available to Virus Bulletin subscribers or can be purchased
as a standalone review ($19.95) from
http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/archive/list

A PDF copy of the comparative review is available to journalists
at http://www.virusbtn.com/files/VBSpam-201401.pdf. (Please do
not reproduce this link.)


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