Vendors continued to heed companies' calls for more spam-fighting tools this week, rolling out new enterprise products and
services designed to can spam.
Both e-mail security provider MX Logic and antispam software and service company Brightmail are unveiling new technologies
that they say can significantly reduce the amount of spam flowing into companies' in-boxes.
Denver, Colorado-based MX Logic said that it is now offering a Bayesian filtering service, which uses a statistical approach
to classifying whether a piece of mail is spam, based on the message's content and properties. Bayesian filtering has received
a lot of attention within the industry lately because it purportedly garners a higher rate of accuracy and a lower rate of
false positives, mistakenly identifying legitimate e-mail as spam.
In fact, Bayesian filtering was the hot topic at a spam filtering conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in January, where industry pundits speculated that mass distribution of the filters might be able to topple the spam
business model by significantly diminishing spammers' response rates.
Although San Francisco-based Brightmail takes a different tack, identifying spam using "honeypots," or false e-mail addresses
that are designed to attract spam, it says that its new enterprise spam filtering software also boasts a high rate of effectiveness
with few false positives.
Brightmail Anti-Spam Enterprise Edition 4.5, which is set to be announced Monday, offers easier deployment, simplified rule
retrieval, and availability on Linux as well as Windows and Solaris, according to Brightmail Enterprise Product Manager Mark
Bruno.
The filter is 92 percent effective in catching spam with a false positive rate of one in 1 million, he said.
"We are way ahead of the competition," Bruno said.
And there seems to be plenty of competition out there. In fact, Felix Lin and Linus Upson, founders of the mobile device software
maker AvantGo Inc., are planning to go public with a new antispam software company next week called Qurb.
While vendors continue to battle it out, companies at least have a range of options when it comes to dealing with their spam
problems.
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