I first started hearing about reputation-based technologies used in conjunction with filtering messages a couple of years ago. What a great idea! It does make sense to analyze the characteristics of a message to help determine whether or not it is legitimate, spam, contains malware, or is likely to be some other type of message you do not want getting onto your corporate network, doesn’t it? Trying to determine the “reputation” of the message seems to be a good additional check. Banks and credit card companies have been doing similar types of activities for decades, looking at the reputation of their loan and card applicants, when generating credit scores. It seems as though this type of analysis, while not fool-proof, could also have the potential to greatly assist with keeping unwanted messages from clogging the enterprise networks and mailservers.

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