The market may even be big enough to support a lot of them. BrightMail Inc, one of the industry’s granddaddies, called the proliferation of unsolicited commercial email an epidemic in a recent white paper. The firm said 55% of the 180 billion emails it scanned in the twelve months to January 31 were filtered as spam.
Desktop-bound spam filters are ten-a-penny, and many can be downloaded freely. Most of the action amongst the new market entrants is at the corporate email gateway, using a mixture of signature-based and concept-based spam recognition techniques.
For companies already playing in markets such as content filtering or anti-virus software, extending their offerings to filter spam is a no-brainer. From the virus side, Network Associates Inc is growing its spam line, and SurfControl Plc is an example of a company approaching the market from a filterware background.
Solid Oak Software Inc, known for its CyberSitter filterware, this week said it is getting in the market too. SpamManager is designed to run on email servers, Solid Oak said, and uses pattern matching from a database it maintains to identify likely spam. The firm claims 97% accuracy with less than 0.1% false positives.
In SpamManager, like many of the systems on the market, emails are scored on their likelihood of being spam, and administrators choose at which levels emails are deleted, quarantined, tagged or rerouted. The system is currently only available for IPSwitch IMail, but versions for Exchange and other platforms are due in the second quarter.
On the other side of the pond, Queria Inc came out of stealth mode this week with its QSpamFilter. The software uses a combination of automatically created address white lists and linguistic analysis to categorize spam into light, regular or heavy based on content, allowing users or administrators to set preferences.
Queria, based in Cerritos, California, said a leading Japanese car manufacturer, which it would not name, is its first big customer. The company’s technology, based on research out of Carnegie Mellon University, is used in other applications that require the concept-based categorization of unstructured data.
Another startup, MailFrontier Inc, is expected to launch an enterprise email gateway product to complement its Matador desktop spam filter. Matador hit version 2.0 last week, and the company said it now supports Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, MSN and IMAP mail.
CipherTrust Inc has been around a bit longer, and this week started shipping the latest version of its IronMail email appliance, which sits between the firewall and email server, scanning incoming email. The latest version has an improved spam-identifying engine, the firm said, and automated whitelisting has also been added to reduce false positives.
Source: Computerwire
