With unwanted e-mail messages continuing to flood corporate
messaging systems, vendors are stepping up efforts to thwart spam
from a variety of fronts.
According to research by Meta Group, the percentage of overall
inbound Internet corporate e-mail classified as spam is between 2%
and 10%, with that number predicted to reach as high as 20% during
the next five years.
IBM Lotus Software Group this week announced that its forthcoming
Lotus Domino 6 will include anti-spam technology that resides on
the server.
Server-side anti-spam tools are designed to give IT administrators
more power to wrestle spam, instead of leaving all the work to
end-users, according to Lotus officials.
"Spam seems to be one of the biggest problems in the messaging
environment," said Ed Brill, senior manager of enterprise messaging
at Lotus.
But, spam-fighting tools are "a control point that needs to live at
the server, and be more managed by the IT staff rather than every
individual corporate user," he said.
The spam-fighting features in Lotus Domino 6 include increased
support for administrators to control incoming messages from
certain distribution lists, the capability to use real-time "black
hole" lists that identify known spammers, server-based rules
processing to allow filtering of message content based on keywords
in the message body, and enhanced capabilities to look up inbound
addresses in the Lotus directory to prevent spam from being routed
through the corporate system.
Although spam fighting is an inexact science that cannot catch
every unwanted message, "every step we can take at the server will
make all the Notes users more productive", Brill said.
With a different approach to combating spam, IronPort Systems
announced a service designed to identify legitimate e-mail rather
than spam. In the BondedSender Program, content providers post a
financial bond that stamps a seal of legitimacy on messages,
company officials said. A third-party financial partner holds the
bond.
The e-mail gateway company hopes to deter spammers by allowing spam
recipients to charge companies for sending unsolicited
e-mail.
"Companies you would want to hear from will have no problem posting
the bond," said Scott Weiss, chief information officer of
IronPort.
IronPort is responding to enterprise concerns that traditional spam
controls frequently block legitimate e-mail messages that could be
business-critical, according to company officials.
"The biggest issue with corporate adoption of anti-spam solutions
is false positives," said Weiss. "Most enterprises are worried
about missing important e-mails in the spam filter."
"We are turning the spam problem on its head. Instead of
identifying the bad guys, we are opening up a new front by
identifying the good mail - people you know and trust," Weiss
continued.
BondedSender taps the IronPort AsyncX technology. Individual e-mail
gateways communicate with IronPort's AsyncX network to get
real-time information on the state of any BondedSender
participant.
Meanwhile, McAfee.com has integrated its Spamkiller service into
the McAfee.com SecurityCenter suite of security tools for personal
computers. Spamkiller is designed to block unsolicited messages
from entering users' inboxes and track spam back to the source ISP.
In addition, the service returns a false "bounced" e-mail message
to the spammer.
Cloudmark has also launched a tool that taps peer-to-peer
technology to fight spam. The company's SpamNet is a Microsoft
Outlook add-in tool that leverages a peer-to-peer architecture to
develop a community-based approach to fighting spam. SpamNet allows
users to block spam messages from their inboxes and automatically
share that information with the SpamNet network.