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How can I use Web Filter categories and reputations as spam filtering tools?

I have found an extensible (and free) email filtering product, which sits in front of my UTM spam filter.   Now I am exploring creative ways to extend the product.

I would like to implement email filtering based on the combination of Category and Recipient.    For example:

  • Marketing staff can receive Social Networking email, but other employees cannot.

  • Human Resources staff can receive Job Search email, but other employees cannot.  (Surprisingly, some employees use their work email account to look for their next job!)

  • Everybody is blocked from gambling site advertising mail.

  • Mail messages from domains with bad web reputation are blocked, even if the domain does not have a bad reputation on an email RBL.

I am actually surprised that this is not a common feature, but I have looked at a lot of products and have never seen it offered.   With UTM, it seems easy enough in concept:

  • Assume that most legitimate email domains, and some illegitimate ones, will also have websites on the domain URL.
  • I expect many of those domains will have reputation and category data in UTM.   
  • Therefore, I want to do a "Policy Help Desk" lookup using the Rest API, to obtain the web category and reputation for a selected domain.

Interpreting the data will be a little tricky, because an email can have many different domains.   The implementation will need to decide which domains should be checked, then determine how to integrate the individual domain scores into a mail disposition decision.

Unfortunately, I have done nothing with the Rest API, and am a little intimidated about getting started.   

Does anyone understand the Rest API sufficiently to provide the general outlines of this approach (or better yet, sample code)?

Am I the only one who thinks this would be a useful thing to do?

Feel free to reply here or by Private Message.

Thank you!



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