Qualitia Co., Ltd. has unveiled its next-generation email security strategy designed to counter highly sophisticated threats in the generative AI era. This move comes in response to an exponential rise in advanced email attacks, such as CEO fraud and phishing, which exploit generative AI to eliminate unnatural language and easily bypass traditional system detection.

Key Pillars of Email Security Strategy in the Generative AI Era

On September 4, 2026, Qualitia Co., Ltd. hosted a media briefing in Tokyo to unveil its next-generation email security strategy, designed to combat rapidly evolving cyber threats supercharged by generative AI. The company has established a formidable track record, serving over 10,000 corporate clients with an active base of nearly 46 million accounts across its cloud and on-premises email security and misdelivery prevention solutions. This latest announcement marks a strategic pivot from addressing isolated, individual threats to completely rebuilding corporate email infrastructure. Specifically, Qualitia is introducing innovative AI-driven defenses: a “Black URL Detection” feature that scans and neutralizes malicious links in incoming emails, and a “Domain AI Judgment” feature that cross-checks email body content with recipient domains to prevent outbound leaks. Underpinning this shift is a newly developed all-in-one business communication platform that seamlessly fuses advanced security and AI capabilities to secure enterprise messaging.

The Surge and Sophistication of AI-Generated Email Attacks

While generative AI tools like ChatGPT have unlocked immense productivity gains for organizations, they have also provided threat actors with highly powerful tools to automate, accelerate, and refine their attacks. Historically, non-native attackers targeting Japanese enterprises were often betrayed by awkward phrasing and grammatical errors. Today, generative AI has dismantled these linguistic barriers, allowing foreign hackers to instantly generate flawless, highly natural Japanese emails that mimic routine business correspondence, invoices, or internal memos. According to data from Proofpoint, the volume of newly identified email threats worldwide surged approximately 15-fold between 2021 and February 2025, with an astonishing 80% of these new threats specifically targeting Japan. A particularly alarming trend in 2026 is the rise of Business Email Compromise (BEC), commonly known as CEO fraud. In these attacks, scammers impersonate high-level executives to build trust before redirecting targets to chat tools. Because these emails are structurally clean and contain no attachments or direct links, they comply perfectly with standard email protocols and easily bypass traditional antivirus, antispam, and sandbox filters, ultimately exploiting human judgment.

The Imperative of “Awareness-Based” Defenses via Human-System Collaboration

Because generative AI has successfully scrubbed spelling errors and unnatural language from phishing attempts, organizations can no longer rely solely on traditional user literacy training to catch malicious messages. To bridge this gap, Qualitia advocates for “awareness-based” security, which emphasizes a collaborative defense model where systems and humans work in tandem. “Awareness” in this context refers to empowering users to notice subtle anomalies by having the security system visually flag suspicious elements. A prominent example is analyzing the routing path of an incoming email from its received headers and displaying the flags of the countries the message traversed directly on the user’s interface. By visualizing these physical routing paths—which remain extremely difficult for attackers to spoof—this approach enhances user scrutiny and has successfully demonstrated a measurable drop in malware infection rates in real-world deployments. This multi-layered architecture addresses the root physical characteristics of email delivery that AI cannot falsify.

Please refer to the diagram below.

Cutting-Edge AI Capabilities and the Unified Communication Platform

Advanced Inbound Defense: Analyzing Unknown Threats to the Final Redirect Destination

To fortify inbound email defenses, Qualitia is integrating a new “Black URL Detection” feature into Active! zone SS, its targeted email attack prevention service. This feature marks Japan’s first integration with “IsItPhishing Threat Detection,” a state-of-the-art URL analysis engine developed by Germany’s Hornetsecurity. When an email containing a link is received, the engine checks the URL in real-time. For previously unknown links, the system actively traces every redirect to analyze the final destination landing page. Beyond basic URL matching, the engine performs deep content analysis on the final page, employing image recognition and OCR text extraction to detect spoofed brand logos and flag fraudulent login portals. This engine runs on over 10,000 smart patterns that are continuously updated through deep learning algorithms. While Qualitia’s existing service already boasts a 99.8% detection rate, adding this advanced URL inspection improves the evasion gap by 48%, boosting detection rates specifically for URL-based malicious emails by over 80% and pushing the overall corporate email detection rate past 99.9%. The feature is scheduled for rollout in early November 2026.

Smarter Outbound Protection: Real-Time Cross-Referencing of Names and Domains via AI

On the outbound front, Qualitia is introducing a “Domain AI Judgment” feature to Active! gate SS, its email misdelivery prevention service. Conventional misdelivery tools generally rely on static rules or basic recipient verification. In contrast, this new capability uses natural language processing to extract the names of target companies directly from the email body text. It then cross-references these names against a proprietary database containing over 2 million registered corporate domains in Japan. If a sender drafts an email addressed to “Company A” in the body text but inputs a domain belonging to “Company B” in the recipient field, the system flags the high probability of a misdelivery. It will automatically place the email in a temporary hold and prompt the sender or administrator to review the message. To ensure continuous optimization, the system records administrator approvals and overrides as training data, improving its contextual analysis over time. Organizations can opt-out of shared telemetry to restrict this learning process to their own local environment. The feature will enter preview in early November 2026, with a general release planned for late January 2027 at an estimated price starting from 500 yen per user per month (excluding tax).

QUALITIA MAIL: Rebuilding Enterprise Communication Infrastructure

The cornerstone of Qualitia’s next-generation strategy is the newly announced “QUALITIA MAIL,” an all-inclusive business communication platform. Slated for release in late January 2027, this platform consolidates Qualitia’s nearly three decades of messaging expertise to eventually succeed and integrate its legacy products, Active! mail and DEEPMail. QUALITIA MAIL transcends traditional email by integrating core communication channels—such as email, chat, and task management—with robust security features and productivity-enhancing AI. Security configurations natively support DMARC to prevent domain spoofing, and BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) to display verified corporate logos in the inbox, making phish attempts immediately obvious. On the productivity front, the platform features generative AI tools for automated reply drafts, email summarizing, and an innovative “AI Emotion Diagnosis” function. This diagnostic tool analyzes draft text to detect underlying stress or potential compliance risks, such as harassment, before a message is sent. The cloud-delivered SaaS version, “QUALITIA MAIL SS,” will launch in late January 2027, offering organizations a highly secure, modern, and unified alternative to disjointed enterprise communication systems.

Reference Pages

• 【Qualitia Co., Ltd. Official Website】https://www.qualitia.com/jp/
• 【Qualitia Press Release: New Announcement of Next-Generation Email Platform “QUALITIA MAIL”】https://www.qualitia.com/jp/news/2026/09/04_1200-2.html
• 【Qualitia Press Release: Integration of “Black URL Detection” into Active! zone】https://www.qualitia.com/jp/news/2026/09/04_1200-3.html
• 【Qualitia Press Release: Integration of “Domain AI Judgment” into Active! gate SS】https://www.qualitia.com/jp/news/2026/09/04_1200-1.html

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