The company, which says it has been GAAP profitable since July, will also announce upgrades designed to ensure that it can still offer customers value when spam is no longer the primary email security concern.
The funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, will be funneled into sales and marketing in the US and overseas. Today the anti-spam market is a bit of a land-grab Postini founder and current VP of products and engineering Scott Petry said.
The company thinks of itself more as an email security firm rather than as an anti-spam company, but right now spam is a huge problem that is not being addressed in many companies. Spam filtering is the best way into an account.
When it becomes less of a land-grab and more like the anti-virus market, a few vendors are going to be left standing, and they will say ‘What else can we do for the customer?’, Petry said. We have a spam bubble right now, but it will burst.
Petry believes a combination of legislation and market saturation of spam filters will tilt the risk-reward seesaw away from the spammers, resulting in an overall reduction in the amount of spam sent.
I think legislation will have some impact, maybe not on the professional spammers, but on the mom-n-pop operations, he said.
Postini operates a hosted mail service that allows companies to apply security policies in fields such as content, virus and spam filtering to incoming mail. Its systems parse email in memory, never actually writing the mail to disk.
To the latest version of its Perimeter Manager Enterprise Edition service, the company has added controls for outbound email. Petry said the same types of policies can be applied as for outgoing mail. It can also insert footers (disclaimers, for example).
The company is also now leveraging its experience of filtering 120 million emails a day to create a database of heuristics about non-spam email characteristics.
This information, gleaned from email content and transport data, will now let users identify email coming from certain vertical industries, such as financial or legal, and apply policies accordingly, Petry said.
In other words, the same way Postini’s software can recognize the characteristics of spam, it can now recognize, for example, the characteristics of legalese. A user could set up filters to always deliver legal-sounding documents, potentially reducing the number of false positives the spam filters create.
Source: ComputerWire
