New corporate antispam services proliferating

Computerworld - Antispam vendors are touting two new products aimed at helping enterprises fight the growing onslaught of spam in their corporate mail systems.
Brightmail Inc. today released a corporate antispam application, while Postini Inc. and Trend Micro Inc. unveiled a partnership that will bring together parts of their technologies to create a new corporate Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service.
Brightmail unveiled its Brightmail Anti-spam Enterprise Edition Version 4.5 application, which is meant to fight spam inside corporate IT systems. The product borrows technologies from Brightmail's existing antispam products for Internet service provider customers, but it adds features specifically for corporate users while omitting others needed by service providers.
Enrique Salem, president and CEO of San Francisco-based Brightmail, said Version 4.5 is the company's first enterprise-specific antispam product.
Brightmail uses technologies that set up "probe decoy" e-mail addresses that shouldn't normally get e-mail, because they belong to no known users, he said. Mail received by those accounts are likely to be spam messages sent out to all known e-mail address configurations. "Legitimate mail should never hit our probes," Salem said.
Brightmail claims false positive rates of one message in 1 million, he said. The server software is priced at $5 to $15 per user per year. The application is available for Windows 2000 or XP, Sun Solaris or Red Hat Linux 7.3.
The Postini/Trend Micro agreement brings together antivirus and Internet content security vendor Trend Micro with e-mail security service provider Postini to create a behind-the-firewall product for corporate spam handling.
By joining with Redwood City, Calif.-based Postini, Trend Micro, in Cupertino, Calif., believes new technologies can be more quickly brought to the marketplace with the best features of both existing products, according to Dan Glessner, Trend Micro's senior director of marketing for the Americas. The first version of the Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service will be available for Solaris servers, with Windows 2000 server and Linux server versions to follow in the coming months, he said. Pricing ranges from as low as $4 per seat for large corporate customers to about $30 per seat for smaller companies.
The product works at the corporate gateway, using scanning software to block spam before it enters the network, according to the companies. Administrators can configure the spam sensitivity according to their own needs.

Read more about Networking in Computerworld's Networking Topic Center.