Phishing/Fraudulent email protection
Effectiveness: Medium
Advantages: Helps to identify fraudulent messages.
Limitations: It uses rules based filtering to identify fraudulent messages. This can cause some fraudulent messages to be undetected. It can also cause some legitimate messages to be tagged as fraudulent. This does not effect the spam classification of messages.
How does it work: SpamBully looks at patterns in email links and message structure that typically occurs in phishing emails. Some of the rules include simple things like whether the link is a numeric IP address. Other rules look to see if a link uses financial institutions that aren't in the root URL. So if a URL contains Ebay but isn't from ebay.com that is a sign of a potentially fraudulent email. We also look at whether an email has web form elements embedded in the message. This does not effect the spam classification of messages. It simply adds a warning when reading a potential fraud email.
Recommendations: We recommend using fraud protection in addition to using a web browser with built in protection. Both FireFox 2.0 and IE 7 have built in fraud protection in their browsers. If you do not like this feature it is easily disabled in the general tab of the options menu.
