“Phishing” is the term used for an email scam that spoofs legitimate companies in an attempt to defraud people of personal and financial information.  MailFrontier Desktop was the first product of its kind to specifically detect and stop phishing emails and we are constantly on the look-out for new and ever increasing complex phishing attacks.

Phishing versus spam
Many companies try to stop phishing email using spam detection techniques.  It doesn’t work.  The best phishing email messages look just like email you would want to receive.  See the figure to the right for an example or better yet take the MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test to see how hard it really is to determine whether a message is legitimate or a phishing email.  Less than 8% of test takers get a 100% with the average score being 71%.

Finding phish
To find phish MailFrontier created a new set of techniques designed to detect even the most deceptive phishing emails.  Once found, MailFrontier places these phishing emails in the “MailFrontier Phishing Mail” folder.  This special designation is to warn people that the email in this folder is not just spam – it’s potentially dangerous.