Antispam vendors roll out tools for corporate users

Computerworld - The battle against the increasing flow of e-mail spam may never be completely won, but technology vendors last week announced several products designed to at least give IT managers a fighting chance to stop unsolicited messages.
San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc. released its first antispam application targeted at corporate users, while Postini Inc. and Trend Micro Inc. unveiled plans to bring together parts of their respective technologies to create a corporate spam prevention offering that will be sold by Cupertino, Calif.-based Trend Micro.
Meanwhile, open-source software vendor Guardian Digital Inc. in Allendale, N.J., introduced a set of Web-based antispam and e-mail security management tools that dovetail with its EnGarde Secure Linux operating system.
Brightmail said the enterprise edition of its antispam software borrows technologies from an earlier release aimed at Internet service providers. But it adds new features for corporate users while omitting some functionality specific to service providers. For example, the enterprise edition offers streamlined installation and administration capabilities and lets IT managers generate performance reports in-house, said Enrique Salem, Brightmail's president and CEO.
Trend Micro said it's combining its own e-mail content filtering tools with heuristic antispam technology developed by Redwood City, Calif.-based Postini. The scanning software can be installed at e-mail gateways in order to block spam messages before they enter corporate networks, according to Trend Micro.
One beta-tester, an IT messaging manager at a large Hollywood film studio who asked to remain anonymous, said a major benefit of the new product is that it fits right in with his existing Trend Micro antivirus applications. That lets him control the studio's entire messaging system from a single console, he said.
In addition, the spam prevention tool has been "good and solid" in testing, the manager said. "If it were up to me, it would be [bought and installed] tomorrow," he added.
Guardian Digital CEO Dave Wreski said his company's e-mail security software suite includes antispam tools developed by Guardian Digital and built-in antivirus software from Oxford, England-based Sophos PLC.
Mark Levitt, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the software vendors are just beginning to crank up their efforts to sell corporate-class antispam tools. Any attempts to address the growing spam problem are welcome, Levitt said. But the biggest challenge facing IT managers is that it's easy for spammers to change their e-mail distribution methods to avoid the detection capabilities built into the tools now, he added.
Fighting spam "is kind of like trying to find al-Qaeda," Levitt said. "It's kind of everywhere."
Brightmail said its Anti-Spam-- Enterprise Edition, Release 4.5, software is priced at $5 to $15 per end user annually and supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux 7.3.
Trend Micro's Spam Prevention Service has a yearly fee of $4 to $30 per end user. The software supports Solaris now and will be extended to run under Windows 2000 and Linux in the coming months, Trend Micro said.
Guardian Digital said its Secure Mail Suite starts at $749 for an unlimited number of e-mail management licenses, plus an annual fee of $18 per user for the company's antispam tools. The software is tied to Guardian Digital's version of Linux.

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