Briefs

12th October 2006, CBRonline

Web hosting company Strato AG plans to add a new spam filtering capability to its services in November, which it claims will eliminate the need for junk mail folders for users to check for false positives.

The Karlsruhe, Germany-based company already offers spam filtering, but the new filter will take it to a higher level, according to CTO Rene Wienholtz. "Any decent filter not only does statistical token analysis, STA, comparing good and bad word counts to detect probable spam, but also performs distributed checks and clearinghouse, DCC, analysis to see how often a message has been seen worldwide," he said. "The problem is that DCC also picks up legitimate mass mailing content such as newsletters, in addition to which spammers can also put out mails to mutate its findings, so there was a need to make more precise definitions."

Strato formed a partnership two years ago with the institute of machine learning at Berlin's Humboldt University. Wienholtz said the result of the alliance is "patent-pending technology that does social graph analysis, whereby we count the number of times one person communicates with a set of others, then calculate a hash value over it."

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