SecureTide™ FAQ

What is SecureTide?

SecureTide 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 SecureTide 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.

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What sets SecureTide apart from other anti-spam services?

SecureTide 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 SecureTide system. The benefit of this collaborate approach is evident in SecureTide's 98% spam capture rate.

AppRiver owns all core email filtering technology used in its SecureTide 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."

More importantly, SecureTide has maintained a 97% customer retention rate since 2002. The SecureTide 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.

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How reliable is SecureTide?

SecureTide 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 SecureTide determine which email to block?

SecureTide 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. SecureTide filtering systems are constantly updated its filtering systems so illicit email is properly blocked.

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How does SecureTide determine which email to block?

AppRiver'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.

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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 AppRiver corporate standard is 24 hours.

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Why do I have to change my MX Record?

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

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What happens to the captured mail and spam junk?

Even the most effective solutions, like SecureTide, will occasionally stop a wanted message. When this happens, SecureTide 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 SecureTide 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. MessageSniffer searches for combinations of spam features including message sources, common obfuscation techniques, email and URL targets and fragments, and even coding styles.

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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.

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Does SecureTide aid in Disaster Recovery?

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

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How much does SecureTide cost?

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

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How do I start using SecureTide?

First, activate the Free 30 day trial form. This will prompt us to email you new MX records within a few hours, typically within the hour during the 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.