KnowledgeBase Articles » Website Probing

Wednesday, October 14, 2015, 07:05

Website Probing

Category: Filtering

Solution ID: 00000281

Summary:

PerfectMail servers will probe websites based on URLs contained in email.

Answer:

As part of our anti-spam efforts, PerfectMail servers will probe websites based on URLs contained in email. When there is insufficient information in an email to make a definitive spam analysis a PerfectMail server may probe weblinks contained in that message. The target webpage or the root of the website may be probed in an effort to extend content filtering efforts.

This is not web-crawling activity, so the robots.txt file is not downloaded. Rather PerfectMail acts as a user-agent, acting on behalf of the message recipient, to verify weblinks contained in received email messages. If PerfectMail is probing a webpage on your website it is because a link to that webpage was included in an email that was received.

PerfectMail webprobes can be identified by the User-Agent String: PerfectMail/2.0 (http://perfectmail.com/kb/web_probe)

Efforts are made to cache website information to minimize webprobe activity.

Tags: perfectmail, antispam, webpage, website, probe, user-agent, robots.txt

Link to this article: https://perfectmail.com/kb/web_probe

Updated: Wednesday, October 14, 2015, 07:05

-- David Rutherford