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Introduction

You should consider MERCMAIL's Philosophy before you determine if our Email Validation Service is right for you. If you understand the basics about what makes EVS Mail different from all other offerings, we think that you cannot help but realize that ours is the best solution for you.

Philosophy

Most of the industry has moved towards statistical analysis to identify both spam and ham (legitimate email). They tell you that it is more accurate than humans at making such determinations. To some extent that is true, since a computer application has no emotion to get in the way. But there is still a margin of error, given that they all produce false negatives and false positives — they make a guess based on previous experience. Major downsides to the statistical analysis approach include wasting enormous amounts of network bandwidth and processing resources in order to work optimally, which can be unnecessarily costly. And as you will see under Consequences, the margins of error can still have disastrous results.

EVS Mail is almost completely the opposite in its approach. Where we can identify (with complete certainty) that an email is spam, it is rejected. With that in mind, we consistently reject over 99.5% of spammer connections BEFORE they even send the message body! This is a tremendous savings in bandwidth and processing. It is also a higher rate than the TOTAL effectiveness for most other offerings. We easily handle the remainder internally, making for 100% effectiveness with No False Positives. Our belief is that the only bad spam is the one that ends up in your inbox.

The rest of the industry is so focused on spam that they can't pull away from the games spammers play. You may be familiar with the "Spammer Arms Race," where the spammer will develop another way past the filters, and the filter writers will then have to find a way to filter that — it is always a game of Catch-Up. You can never get ahead that way.

MERCMAIL takes the opposite approach. We focus on legitimate email, making sure that it can always get through.

While we are not exclusive in this regard, it is important to do your spam control before the email gets to your PC or Inbox, and that's what we do. If you allow any unauthorized email to your Inbox, you have wasted bandwidth and processing, and you still risk that an undetected virus will be run on your PC. If everything is done on a gateway (and is 100% effective, as ours is), then no unvalidated email can put your PC at risk.

Consequences

Many people do not consider it, but spam and false positives are all about consequences: Will that next spam just be annoying, or will it be a successful Identity Theft phishing expedition that wipes out your life savings? Could it contain an innocent file attachment, or will it be some malicious code that destroys data and/or takes days to recover from, if you can recover at all? Some victims have even been threatened and extorted when they inadvertently activated something in the message with their email program's preview pane and were not fooled!

Will that missing message be a note from Mom that will be questioned the next time you talk with her and just be a minor embarassment, or will it be that $Million order enquiry that you'll never know about?

Consequences are entirely unpredictable, as are the risks. What chances are you willing to take? Our Email Validation Service actually guarantees 100% effectiveness and that all legitimate email can get through. Anything less, and you may have to deal with the consequences…

Conclusion

You now have a few choices in to consider. You can do nothing, but that is unlikely, given that you must have had some incentive for finding and reading this page. You can follow the rest of the spam control industry as it wastes bandwidth and processing resources, and yet still risk false negatives and false positives. Or you can select EVS Mail and reap the rewards of a complete spam control solution.