'Spam will cause huge losses'

Spam is becoming a big nuisance in the corporate world. Gartner analysts predict that left unchecked, spam will comprise over 50 percent of corporate e-mail by 2004. According to the Ferris Group, in 2003, corporations will cause $10 billion in costs related to spam. But there's a new service that keeps a check on spam, and it could minimize the amount of unsolicited mail that reaches your Inbox. (Ed: A Spam ROI calculator is available on www.trendmicro.com)

Spamming has become relatively easy since e-mail protocols are easier to forge, user addresses are simple to harvest, and there is virtually no cost involved with sending out spam. In response to the need for anti-spam tools to handle this increased threat, Trend Micro has introduced a Spam Prevention Service that offers subscribers a flexible defense system. Trend says its service has anti-spam rules, which are frequently adapted to provide effective protection against the latest spam threats. The service leverages gateway scanning software to block non-productive and malicious spam before it enters the network.

Once a message is defined as spam, Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service enables IT security administrators to take pre-defined actions, such as tagging, delivering or re-routing the message. IT security administrators can also configure spam prevention sensitivity in five categories: hate mail, get-rich-quick solicitations, messages containing sexual content, bulk mail, or commercial spam. This level of user-configuration allows customers to apply the level of granularity to spam detection that they need, while offering the most optimal performance possible based on these user-defined filtering rules. Beta test results suggest that Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service can potentially block 90-95 percent or more of spam, with a very low occurrence of incorrectly identifying messages as spam.

The Trend Micro Spam Prevention Service is immediately available in India. For more details see the ‘Shelf Space’ section of this issue or log on to www.trendmicro.com