ANS Spam Plus AV™ FAQs

What is ANS Spam Plus AV™?

ANS Spam Plus AV™, powered by Appriver, is a fully-managed email protection service that prevents up to 99% of spam, phishing, viruses, and other internet pollution from impacting an organizations infrastructure. Since ANS Spam Plus AV™ is delivered as a service there is nothing to install, configure or manage. Setup couldn't be easier and usually takes less than an hour regardless of the size of the organization.

What sets ANS Spam Plus AV™ apart from other anti-spam
services?

ANS Spam Plus AV™, powered by an industry award winner Appriver processes over 16 billion messages per month for about 15,000 companies on 6 continents. The service is maintained and updated through a collaboration of in-house rule-techs and automated systems 24x7x365. An average of 4000-8000 updates per day is made to the ANS Spam Plus AV™ system. The benefit of this collaborate approach is evident in ANS Spam Plus AV™'s 98% spam capture rate.

AppRiver owns all core email filtering technology used in our ANS Spam Plus AV™ service, which allows the company to be highly adaptable in the fast-changing anti-spam environment, ensuring the system's quality and cost variables remain under its control. In its evaluation of this technology for its 2006 "Pattern Recognition: Technical Insights" report, research firm Frost & Sullivan observed, "AppRiver's real skill set comes from speed-spam and virus capture rates second to none in the security industry."

More importantly, ANS Spam Plus AV™ has maintained a 97% customer retention rate since 2004. The ANS Spam Plus AV™ support staff is dedicated to continually improving the customer experience and always encourages client feedback. We also offer a free 30 day trial with no contract requirements or cancellation penalties.

How reliable is ANS Spam Plus AV™?

ANS Spam Plus AV™ was designed to have built in redundancies at every level: from SAS70 Level 2 compliant data centers spread across different continents, to bundling bandwidth from 6 major Network Providers to ensure reliability. Our Tier-1 facilities are located in Texas, Virginia, London and Hong Kong and are well-protected against power failure, equipment malfunction and natural disaster.

How does ANS Spam Plus AV™ determine which email to block?

ANS Spam Plus AV™ removes spam and viruses from your incoming email and sends only legitimate mail to your network. In a fraction of a second, every piece of your company's email is subjected to a blend of proven filtering techniques. ANS Spam Plus AV™ filtering systems are constantly updated its filtering systems so illicit email is properly blocked.

ANS’s service prevents spam and viruses from ever reaching the users' servers and uses innovative, proprietary technology for creating the rules that filter email. Rules are created through a collaboration of automated systems (Rule-Bots) and people (Rule-Techs).

The system is designed as a continuous, large-scale learning process where human and machine elements collaborate to produce and refine the filtering rules. The machines do things that the people can't, such as comparing and cataloging features on millions of messages very quickly. Likewise, people do things that the machine can't, such as recognizing a new spam or obfuscation technique with a single spam sample. (For example, humans can quickly recognize sexual innuendo.)

Each checks each other's work, shares new information, and learns from successes and failures. The entire system evolves rapidly and retains what it learns as it moves forward.

How long does it take to set up?

Typically account creation and MX record change notices can be sent out in under 2 hours; the outside threshold per ANS corporate standard is 24 hours.

Why do I have to change my MX Record?

ANS Spam Plus AV™ resides between the Internet and your mail server. If your email is hosted by a 3rd party, ANS Spam Plus AV™ sits between the Internet and your mail hosting company. By replacing your MX record with an MX record provided by ANS Spam Plus AV™, your inbound mail will travel from the internet, through ANS Spam Plus AV, where it will be scanned for spam and viruses, and then be passed to your network.

What happens to the captured mail and spam junk?

Even the most effective solutions, like ANS Spam Plus AV™, will occasionally stop a wanted message. When this happens, ANS Spam Plus AV™ users can instantly release the wanted message by using their Daily Held Mail Report. This detailed report can be optionally enabled per end-user and provides them with 100% visibility to all their mail that has been held as spam, or "junk."

Web access to the quarantined email is also available to administrators or end-users. AppRiver owns all core email filtering technology used in its ANS Spam Plus AV™ service, which allows the company to be highly adaptable in the fast-changing anti-spam environment ensuring the system's quality and cost variables remain under AppRiver's control. In its evaluation of AppRiver's technology for its 2006 "Pattern Recognition: Technical Insights" report, research firm Frost & Sullivan observed, "AppRiver's real skill set comes from speed-spam and virus capture rates second to none in the security industry."

The company's proprietary scanning engine, Message Sniffer, uses advanced pattern recognition technology and a regularly updated "rules" database to accurately identify spam. Message Sniffer searches for combinations of spam features including message sources, common obfuscation techniques, email and URL targets and fragments, and even coding styles.

Does ANS Spam Plus AV™ aid in Disaster Recovery?

Yes. If a client-side server is not accepting email for any reason, ANS Spam Plus AV™'s delivery manager will encrypt and queue email until the client server is back online.

What scanning engines do you use?

All service offerings incorporate our proprietary Message Sniffer signature database, which was described as having "...speed-spam and virus capture rates second to none in the security industry" in a September 2006 Frost & Sullivan Report on Pattern Recognition (Technical Insights).

Message Sniffer is owned and managed by AppRiver and licensed to a large number of ISPs, corporations and other anti-spam companies. The proprietary spam detection engine has the ability to run approximately 70,000 signature test against an email in under 5 milliseconds. It is maintained and updated by in-house rule-techs 24x7x365.

How much does ANS Spam Plus AV™ cost?

Pricing for ANS Spam Plus AV™ is determined by your company's mailbox count, the required options, and by the length of service agreement. Contact us at sales@anscorp.com to receive pricing for your specific requirements.

How do I start using ANS Spam Plus AV™?

First, activate your free 30 day trial by calling ANS at 330-645-4266 or by emailing our sales team at sales@anscorp.com. We will setup your account and email you new MX records by the next normal business day. The next step will be to change your MX records, which we can help you coordinate. Once the MX records have been changed, you are finished. No more spam.

Quality Protection and Flexible Support

At ANS, we pride ourselves on providing clients with affordable, effective solutions for companies of all sizes. We're constantly looking for ways to improve our services by utilizing the best companies on the market. In addition, customers have constant access to our quality support team.

Contact us today to learn more about ANS Spam Plus AV™.

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