Mail Classification Terms and Definitions

Terminology

• Spam - unsolicited junk email / useless email that you never asked to receive.  Spam is often understood as any email that a recipient didn't want, but true Spam is something that will always carry a payload (a link to some website or stock or something) containing some information that tries to financially benefit a third party, and often sent using criminal means (misappropriation of email servers or clients for bandwidth or false legitimacy, as well as the unethical harvesting or guessing of email addresses).  It is important to remember that Spam would not exist if not enough people were fooled by it into parting with their money.
• Ham, Clean, Innocent - these are synonyms we use for email that doesn't fall into the other categories and which Proofpoint Essentials should pass unhindered.
• Bulk Mail - compared with spam, this is undesired email, but legitimate; like newsletters or marketing material from legitimate businesses.  Remember that recruitment/news/normal looking website/agency you subscribed to, or sent a card/article/comic to a friend?  Did you read their privacy policy?  True to their word, your emails never traveled further than their business group, and set of partners, and their partners’ partners, and were never divulged for reasons other than promotion of their business.
• Virus - a malignant executable that hides and poses as, or in the middle of, something it is not, and spreads itself actively when running or passively by relying on social engineering (fooling people to forward that email); classic viruses used to harm one's computer (like formatting/damaging the disk) but modern viruses tend to try to either steal information (access credentials, credit card details, identity theft) or take control of your computer (and join a botnet (a network of 'bots), using it to send spam, launch attacks, etc.)
• Business Email Compromise (BEC) - a type of email cyber crime scam in which an attacker targets a business to defraud the company. Business email compromise is a large and growing problem that targets organizations of all sizes across every industry around the world. Examples: CEO Fraud, Account Compromise, False Invoice Scheme, Attorney Impersonation, Data Theft. 
• False Positive - a positive is desired email, and this term is from classification theory, i.e. a false positive is a desired email that falsely got misclassified as spam.
• False Negative - a negative is undesired email (spam/virus), and in this terminology a false negative is an undesired email that falsely got misclassified as clean.
• Anti-Spoofing - This is a new feature that you can control how Proofpoint Essentials reacts to the sending server's security protocols. For more information, review this article: https://help.proofpoint.com/Proofpoint_Essentials/Email_Security/Administrator_Topics/Other_Features/Configuring_Inbound_Anti-Spoofing_Policies
• Permalink - A link that can be provided to Technical Support to reference a specific email communication. Log Details Button - This article includes information on how to capture the Permalink and review important email communication.
• Email Bomb - A series of newsletters and email services being rapidly signed up for a target email address. This leads to a flood of unwanted emails that send legit confirmation emails to the services. Here are ways to mitigate these kinds of attacks using our Essentials Platform. Users bombarded with unsolicited email as result of email bomb

Are you seeing False Positives or Negatives and wondering how to report them? Check out our article False Positive and False Negative Reporting!