According to Réal Waite, QNS network manager, the National Assembly received 435,000 e-mail messages in August. Of these only 77,000 got through the Meridius appliance. The rest — 355,000 — were all rejected. Only 101 messages got through and were subsequently blocked by the organization’s anti-virus software.
Waite said the problem he faces is complicated by the fact that as a political organization and with a large number of the e-mail addresses that are publicly listed, his users’ inboxes are easy for spammers to find. Meridius is a dedicated mail relay that uses Recurrent Pattern Detection technology to identify and quarantine spam and viruses in real-time regardless of language, content or message format. When Meridius receives a message, it captures the digital signature and header information and forwards a query to the Detection Centre’s real-time database. These signatures are analyzed and matched against more than six million signatures and returned to Meridius tagged as either unknown, suspected, bulk or spam. It is then either accepted or rejected.