Brightmail Inc, which changed its name from Bright Light Technologies Inc last week, is to announce the first major customer for its anti-spam service today. AT&T WorldNet Services will deploy the Brightmail service and make it available to its 1.6 million subscribers, free of charge, by the end of this year.
San Francisco-based Brightmail, which along with its name change announced a second round of funding worth $12m last week, cites a Gartner Group study which found that 74% of email users believe that their ISPs should control spam. With the cost of attracting and adding new users set at around $75 per user, ISP’s are keen to avoid fast user churn or turnover due to discontent with spam.
Brightmail has existing technology and distribution agreements with Netscape Communications Corp, Sendmail Inc and Software.com, and set up what it calls its Probe Network of 35m email accounts with partners such as Concentric Network Inc, Earthlink Network Inc, Excite Inc, Juno Online Services Inc and USA.net. From this network it gets an early warning of any widespread spam, which it analyzes in real time at a Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center, staffed – by real people – 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Brightmail typically decides what is and what isn’t spam by working out if a message was unsolicited, and by seeing how widely it was replicated.
Brightmail expects to sign up more ISPs over the next few months, perhaps from its list of Probe partners, who are already familiar with the Brightmail service and who receive analysis figures from Brightmail about spam levels. Between 5% and 25% of all email received is spam according to various estimates.
The company, founded in 1997, received $5.5m in first round funding from Accel Partners Inc and a group of angel investors. The second round was led Technology Crossover Ventures with Omega Venture Partners and the first round participants. It prices its service based on the number of mailboxes.
