Summary: This service will typically block 99% - 99.5% of spam, and is very unlikely to block legitimate email. Besides the obvious, time-saving benefits of stopping spam, the service has additional benefits:

• Saves internet bandwidth to your in-house mail server. These savings are often greater than the price of this service!
• Reduces the chance your co-workers will be victims of a credit card or identity theft.
• The anti-virus option reduces the chance your company will be infected with a costly virus.
• Reduces lost email by "spooling" (Store and Forward) messages in the event your mail server is off-line.
• The personal blacklist can be used to block someone who is harassing your co-workers.
• Nearly eliminates pornography and other vulgar email that is highly offensive to many people.

Stops 98% - 99.5% of all spam

With the initial, default settings, CASH will "out of the box" block 99% of all spam for most customers. We believe it is actually very close now to 99.5%. (I.e. we block 199 out of 200 spams.) If the Realtime Blacklists (RBLs) and Country Filtering are disabled, our service will still block 98% of spam; in this mode the false-positive rate will be less than 1 in 100,000 (i.e. 99.999% of legitimate email will pass).

Depending upon the security of your mail server, the perceived spam blocking may be less, because some spam may be able to bypass our service. Ideally, if you have an in-house mail server and set a firewall to only accept email from our service, no spam can bypass our service, and over 99% of spam will be blocked.

If your email is hosted at an ISP or outside hosting company, the perceived spam blocking may be only 95%. Most of the remaining spam will actually be bypassing our service due to tricks that spammers use. If your ISP (Hosting company) supports "optimal MX records", you can reduce the spam which bypasses our service and thereby typically block 98-99% of all spam. (In-house mail servers should also use the optimal MX records.)

Reducing spam increases productivity and morale. By industry estimates, each employee spends over an hour a month just deleting spam; many are also deeply offended by its content. As more employees receive email on remote laptops, PDAs and pagers, it becomes even more important to stop spam.

Unlikely to block legitimate e-mail

The top priority of CASH is to not block legitimate email. Our primary filtering databases only contain items that have been carefully checked and explicitly added by our staff who monitor spam 24/7. Also, some of our customers have given us explicit permission to monitor the spam blocked by our various filters. This lets us closely double-check that new filters and phrases are not blocking legitimate emails.

CASH does not block email based on simple phrases or "trigger" words. Therefore you do not need to be concerned that an inadvertently used word will block an important email message. Also, CASH does not block based on the "Open Relay Data Base," too many legitimate companies are unintentionally on this list.

As an example, we recently sent an email newsletter to our Casey Group customers. Some of these emails were blocked by their spam filters because our newsletter included the phrase "as seen on" in the sentence, "...as seen on the previous page". These primitive anti-spam services were obviously looking for variations of the phrase "as seen on TV", which often occurs in spam. Any anti-spam service that uses filtering based on simple phrases is not only very error-prone, but potentially a liability.

With the default settings, using both Realtime Blacklists (RBLs) and Country Filtering, typically one in a two thousand legitimate emails may be blocked (false-positive). While no one wants to lose an important email, without an anti-spam service it is likely that some legitimate emails are getting deleted because they got lost in all the spam. Combined with our "Store and Forward" backup function, our service will actually reduce the amount of lost email.

Virtually all of the legitimate emails that are blocked are due to the Realtime-Blacklists (RBL). Since CASH does not rely heavily on RBLs, you can optionally disable the RBLs. This will typically reduce the false-positive rate to less than 0.01% and close to 0.001% (one in 100,000); it will only reduce the spam blocking from 99% to about 98%.

Since a new subscriber will not be familiar with our service, and understandably not fully trust our blocking criteria, we suggest that you initially have all spam forwarded to a "review" mailbox. You can then scan this mailbox for legitimate emails. Once you are satisfied with our blocking criteria (including the options you can select), you can then turn off the forwarding and have the spam simply deleted.

With a domain-specific "White list", you can ensure that your important clients can always email you! Optionally, you can set up special "bypass" mailboxes which bypass the spam blocking.

Our service can also "Reject" spam by sending a rejection message to the sender. It is not just the "Undeliverable mail" message you may have seen, but a detailed message that explains that CASH.com blocked their email and why. You can even configure the rejection message. For example, it could read:

We are sorry that your email to caseygrp.com was blocked by our anti-spam service. You can either resend it to the special email address salesx4@caseygrp.com or call us at (973)555-1515.

The sender will then probably contact you by phone or other means. You can then add them to your "Whitelist".

Save internet bandwidth to in-house mail servers

Since CASH filters spam before it reaches your in-house mail server, it can save a huge amount of your internet bandwidth. For our heavily-spammed customers, this saving is greater than the cost of the service.

A typical small business, e.g. with 50 mailboxes, will find that 10% of their T1 internet connection is used by email, with nearly all of it being spam or "dictionary attacks" which attempt to harvest your valid email addresses. With a typical T1 price of $700/month, CASH will likely save you $70/month of bandwidth, and improve the speed of your internet access.

As an extreme case, one of our customers with only 30 mailboxes receives over 400,000 spam a day. Before our service, their mail server and T1 were at over 90% capacity due to the spam.

A typical larger business, e.g. with 500 mailboxes, may find that their mail server is dropping email connections during spam "attacks", resulting in delayed or lost email. CASH not only saves your internet bandwidth, it eliminates the need for secondary or backup mail servers.

Reduce chance of Credit Card theft

Recently, a new kind of much more dangerous spam has appeared. Instead of just trying to sell you a dubious product, it is an outright attempt to steal Credit Card numbers and possibly engage in Identity Theft.

Typically these spam appear to be a legitimate and very official email from Ebay, PayPal, CitiBank, Barklays or other financial institution. They state that you must re-activate or "secure" your account by going to a website. The website also has a legitimate and official appearance with the correct logos and "look and feel". Typically, the website then has a form requesting credit card numbers and personal information. Non-computer savvy users could easily be fooled by these criminal emails.

While no service can block every one of these fraudulent emails, CASH makes it the top priority to stop them, often with three different filtering methods to catch all variations.

Ideal for any Business

CASH's exceptional accuracy, especially in not blocking legitimate emails, makes it ideal for any business. It will not block legitimate newsletters from banks that contain mortgage offers, or any of the other types of newsletters that are often blocked by other anti-spam systems.

CASH is even suitable for medical and legal organizations that must allow emails with any content. Since CASH does not block spam by using "trigger" words or simple phrases, it will not block legitimate emails even if they contain medical words such as "viagra", sexual or criminal phrases, etc.

Indeed, many of CASH's first customers were law firms and medical groups. All are still using the service and none have ever reported problems with blocked emails.

Personal "Whitelist"

An important feature of CASH is that you can create a personal "Whitelist" to ensure that your important clients and other contacts will never be blocked, even if their mail system somehow ends up black-listed. By adding your product names to a "content Whitelist", you can even ensure that any email that mentions your products is never blocked.

You can whitelist by IP address, email address and/or content. For example, if your company makes a product called " MasterWidget" you can configure your domain to accept any email which contains "MasterWidget" anywhere within it.

You can easily update your personal white-list from the Control Panel.

Since CASH depends partially on other organization's " blacklists", we maintain a "Global Whitelist" for all customers, and will consider your suggestions. The primary entries in our global whitelist consist of:

• Major legitimate newsletters and mailing lists.
• Legitimate companies in countries that are otherwise blocked.

You can make Global Whitelist suggestions from the Control Panel or by email.

Personal "Blacklist"

You can also create a personal "blacklist" to block email from certain sources. It does not need be spam; it can be used to block someone who is harassing your employees. Or you might want to block recruiters who are trying to steal your employees.

You can blacklist by IP address, email address and/or content. For example, if badguy1@gmail.com is harassing you, all emails from him can be completely blocked, without blocking all of yahoo.com. Such blocked emails can be re-routed to your "spam" mailbox or completely blocked.

You can update your personal "black list" from the Control Panel.

Anti-Virus Scanning

CASH can scans email attachments for viruses and remove infected ones. It adds a summary of its scanning to the bottom of the email message, before the attachments. For example:

------------------
These attachments have been scanned by CASH for viruses:
- Attachment: LEGEND.XLS Status: CLEAN
- Attachment: CODELIST.TXT Status: CLEAN
- Attachment: SCREEN.BAT Status: INFECTED! REMOVED
------------------

We use the F-Prot Antivirus software by Frisk Software - www.f-prot.com. This company has been providing anti-virus software for 10 years. It is the "engine" used in many well-know anti-virus software packages. The latest anti-virus definitions are updated daily.

Technical - Our service also scans for viruses within ".zip" files. However, we only scan attachments of up to 5 megabytes. This is far larger than the size of any known virus and is large enough to scan nearly all .zip files. The summary will indicate if a huge attachment was not scanned.

Note: while this optional service will remove the vast majority of known email viruses, viruses can also infect computers in other ways. For maximum protection, we therefore recommend that you also run anti-virus software on each of your computers. While no service or software can guarantee that 100% of all viruses will be caught, CASH offers an additional strong level of virus protection.

BONUS - Increase your e-mail reliability

You may understandably be concerned about blocking that one-in-ten-thousand email from an important prospect. CASH actually reduces the chance that you miss any email. This service uses two "relays" which will spool (i.e. "save") your email messages in the event your mail server is off-line due to power failure, system email crash, routine maintenance, a fiber cut, or any other reason. When your mail server is back on-line, it will automatically receive the spooled email. (Our service will spool your mail for up to five days.) During the blackout of 2003, not one of our customers in the blackout area lost a single email.

Even assuming a worst-case scenario that CASH blocks 0.1% of legitimate email, then doing the math, if your mail server is off-line for just one hour a month (e.g. for update patches), CASH actually increases your email reliability. Since a typical ISP's email system is down for several hours each month (more than they like to admit), our service will greatly increase your reliability.

This valuable service is sold separately by other companies by the name "E-mail backup" or "Store and Forward"; it is included here at no additional charge. This service benefits your IT department since they can now take your mail server off-line for routine maintenance, updates, etc. (It is very likely that your IT department or hosting provider takes your mail server off-line regularly without informing you. During this time, your email is lost.)

Our two relays are located at different data centers for complete redundancy and reliability.

In summary, the reliability of your email is our primary concern.