Email Authentication using Recipient Verification
Spammers doing what they are good at, send out millions of spam emails to millions of email accounts. A common spammer technique is to send email to unknown accounts in the hope that a user exists. For example if I wanted to spam lots of accounts, I would attempt to spam common names and domains such as HarryPotter@common-domain.com, and if this is not a valid account, I would attempt different variations as well such as H.Potter@common-domain.com, HPotter@common-domain.com, and so on. Hopefully for me one of these accounts will be a real and live account.
Another problem similar to the above is directory harvesting attacks where spammers learn whether a recipient is a valid account, usually gathering such information and selling this on.
These can become a serious issue for a company. If your email security was to process every email for none existent users, this can very quickly bog down your email security resources as well as taking up bandwidth.
So to counter attack this problem, a feature known as recipient verification was introduced. Before an email is accepted for further spam checks, the email filter will check if the recipient of the email is actually for a user that exists within their organisation. If the email exists, then the message will be accepted for further processing, and if the recipient does not exist the email is dropped. This is an extremely powerful feature, usually dropping over 50% of email, why it proves to be widely popular with anti-spam vendors.
There's various ways to check if a recipient in an email is actually a real user via different recipient based authentication checks using protocols and authentication databases such as LDAP, Radius, SMTP, IMAP and POP3. LDAP is the most popular option. Many companies already have an Active Directory database, so is all that is needed is LDAP configured on the email spam filter to look at the active directory list of user for verification.
Further Reading
Wikipedia's guide to email authentication