The concept behind RTC is to empower email users with far greater control over the senders and content accorded access to their inbox. This is accomplished by utilizing protective addresses to create distinct inbox access routes that are individually manageable by policy. RTC exploits this capability to ensure the delivery of good mail, elevating wanted content from valid senders to a status that doesn’t require content filtering, and thereby eliminating false positives, even for bulk and transactional mail (which typically experience a 20% false positive rate). With RTC’s blended technology, users may also choose to block bad mail using content filtering.
RTC’s popular Address-on-the-Fly (AOTF) feature illustrates the power of Protective Addresses as a proactive means of guarding one’s inbox from unwanted content. With AOTF, a user could spontaneously declare a new address by simply adding a pertinent suffix to the user name portion of their existing address. When RTC identifies an incoming address in AOTF format, e.g., johndoe.ebay@company.com, it delivers the email to John Doe’s inbox, regardless of the content, and stores both the sender’s address and the transaction-specific Protective Address in a database of valid to-from address pairs that are used to make inbox access decisions. If this address is then used by a different sender, RTC identifies a sharing event, notifies the recipient, and gives him or her the ability to block future messages from the new sender or restrict future use of the address solely to the party to which it was initially disclosed. Both the sharing notification and policy choices are presented to the user in a unique, dynamic HTML control panel that RTC automatically attaches to the bottom of the incoming message (and strips from outgoing forwarded messages). Users find this informative and empowering feature to be a significant improvement in the email experience.
AOTF alone is an effective means of thwarting spam. Experience tells us that legitimate correspondents never knowingly share one’s email address with spammers, and that spam often arises from public address disclosures, such as on Web sites and in discussion forums. AOTF provides a protective address for disclosure and the tools to block any sender that abuses an address. Additionally, the control panel provides an alternative to the unsubscribe function in many emails, which consumers no longer trust out of fear that it merely alerts a spammer to a “live” recipient.
AOTF is also an effective means of thwarting phishing exploits. For example, for online banking a user might declare the address johndoe.mybank567@domain.com. By choosing an address that phishers are not likely to guess, the recipient can readily identify any incoming “My Bank” email (a non-conforming address as fraudulent). What a simple way to re-establish trust in online communications!
Customers can use AOTF selectively, as described above, or in fully-automatic mode for all of their communications, or not at all. In fully automatic mode, messages from new senders trigger a customizable change of address (CoA) message that asks the originator to resend their message to a new address that is automatically determined by Reflexion's Supplemental Address Management System (SAMS), e.g., johndoe.senderdomain@company.com. The automated CoA message eliminates the vast majority of spam, because spammer systems don’t reply to such messages. If an address is somehow shared or harvested, the to-from address pair test and the policy control panel provide the means of defeating any new source of spam that might arise on the address.
Reflexion’s defense is primed by the automatic development of a whitelist using “whitelist on first outbound message” and “whitelist on reply” capabilities, in conjunction with an automated Outlook contact importer. With Reflexion whitelisting, authorized correspondents all use the recipient’s primary address, e.g., johndoe@company.com. If this address starts to receive spam, the recipient can use the control panel to ”lock down“ the community of authorized senders, and then automatically start the process of building a second whitelist using a similar protective address, such as jdoe@company.com or john.doe@company.com. In this fashion, Reflexion users can create a family of whitelists, and use the simple control panel to update their allow/deny choices to keep each community spam free.
Total Control’s address-based defense is inherently content independent, and hence does not fall prey to the things that trip-up fallible filters – it dramatically reduces false positives, it’s effective for messages that include images and links or contain common spam words, and it works for messages in any language. The CoA messages and user control panel have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian.
Reflexion offers unique capabilities not found in any other email threat protection offering. It can be configured and deployed in a simple set-and-forget fashion to provide the entire user base with immediate inbox relief, and then be tailored as necessary to meet the needs of users with unique requirements.
Overview
Reflexion Total Control restores confidence in email by empowering users with unprecedented, proactive control over their inbox. Protective Addresses – the future in email security – put users in control of who communicates with them, assuring access for desirable correspondents, regardless of their content, and isolation for unwanted senders and content. Users can easily update their access policies through a simple in-message Total Control Panel, which also identifies address sharing and reveals the true envelope address of the sender. Total Control blends its patent-pending Protective Address Defense (PAD) with traditional approaches, including content analysis, spam tricks recognition, reputation scoring, and whitelisting, to produce a remarkably effective system for blocking spam, viruses, DoS, and directory harvesting attacks, identifying phishing attacks, detecting zombie computers and open relays, and providing email business continuity. By elevating increasing amounts of email to a state that doesn’t require spam filtering, Total Control overcomes the false-positive problem inherent to fallible filters, even for bulk and transactional mail, which, according to Return Path, normally experiences a 20% false positive rate. Total Control is a highly effective solution that can be deployed to solve any spam problem within an organization of any size or for ISPs.
Managed Services - Inbound and Outbound
Reflexion is deployed as a managed service; all inbound and outbound mail is routed for scanning and security. (Outbound mail is optionally sent through Reflexion by changing the Smart Host on the customer’s mail server or via SMTP Authentication to provide Outbound Mail Auditing, e.g. outbound virus scanning, zombie detection and open relay alerting.)
Advancing the State of the Art
Reflexion advances the state of the art by blending its powerful address-based technology with traditional content scanning engines and whitelisting capabilities. This result is a uniquely effective solution with concrete advantages for end-users and the solution providers who support them.
First, Reflexion’s popular Address-on-the-Fly feature provides users with controllable, purpose-specific addresses for uncontrolled disclosures, such as on the Web or in print. Advantages include:
- Protects the user’s primary address from new sources of spam
- Assures the delivery of wanted mail, even bulk and transactional mail
- Makes phishing attacks immediately self-evident.
Second, the Total Control Panel provides insight into a message and empowers users with the tools to keep their inbox clean. Advantages include:
- Provides a simple means of updating the user’s access policies
- Provides access choices beyond Yes and No, for example, to lockdown use of an address exclusively to senders at the domain on which it was initially disclosed
- Informs the user of a spoofed "from" address
- Works on any device, including Blackberry’s and other mobile devices.
Third, Reflexion supports intelligent whitelisting, in which communities of bona fide senders are formed on clearly identifying addresses, such as John.Doe@, JDoe@, John_Doe@, etc. Advantages include:
- Multiplies the scope of whitelisting benefits
- Provides a mechanism tantamount to opening a new email account to escape spam, but with the advantage of not inconveniencing trusted senders