NEW YORK, LONDON, HONG KONG - 1 December, 2004 - MessageLabs, the leading provider of managed email security services to businesses, today announced the launch of MessageLabs Anti-Spam 4.0, incorporating Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam technology and additional enhancements that increase spam capture effectiveness and lower false positive rates.

MessageLabs Anti-Spam 4.0 features a multi-layered approach – including MessageLabs Skeptic™ Anti-Spam predictive technology, Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam technology and additional layers of detection techniques - designed to stop all spam before it reaches corporate networks while ensuring that businesses receive legitimate email.

The service is fully managed as part of MessageLabs suite of managed email security and management services, providing businesses with applications that lower total cost of ownership, reduce bandwidth and storage costs, protect critical infrastructure, manage and reduce risk and secure business communications.

“For years MessageLabs has provided businesses around the world with a cutting-edge anti-spam service that blocks unwanted messages and gives value back to their mission critical communications,” said Jos White, President of MessageLabs Inc. “With spam now the majority of email and converging with viruses and phishing, businesses need solutions that eliminate all email security threats and reduce operational, financial and legal risks. Our current and future customers will now have the highest levels of spam protection and the business benefits related to a managed service.”

Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam technology is one of the leading anti-spam technologies on the market and has consistently been found to have superior effectiveness and low false positive rates. By integrating this software with its proprietary Skeptic predictive technology, MessageLabs has created a highly effective, multi-layered managed anti-spam service that enterprises of any size and industry can leverage.

"Spam will continue to be significant problem for the foreseeable future, and organizations must aggressively erect a continuously adapting set of barriers to keep spam at bay. Anti-spam solutions that use a layered approach and multiple proactive and reactive detection techniques provide significant benefits over other models. They are highly accurate in detecting and blocking spam and effective at limiting critical false positives and are well-suited to defend against the ever changing nature of spam," said Matt Cain, Senior Vice President, META Group.

"As a MessageLabs customer, we were familiar with the benefits of a managed service and were achieving 98 percent detection and low false positives already," said Steve Jackson, Chief Information Officer at PRTM in the UK. "When we tested the multi-layered solution, we redirected spam to a separate account to ensure effectiveness. Impressed to find that false positives were non-existent with the new signaturing capability and that the service overall was blocking 99.8 percent of the spam heading for our network, we moved to the block and delete option for the signaturing element, making it much easier to manage the negligible number of false positives.

“Given the complexity and volume of spam and that MessageLabs processes more than 125,000 emails for us daily, upgrading to Anti-Spam 4.0 has been a hugely positive experience and we believe confirms why MessageLabs leads the managed email security services market."

Additional enhancements of MessageLabs’ Anti-Spam Version 4.0 include the Spam Manager off site quarantine facility, improved connection-based filtering and greater levels of double-byte, or Asian character spam detection, now a requirement for most global organizations.

Spam Manager

For an increasing number of organizations, spam represents the majority of all email received, in excess of 73 percent according to MessageLabs’ latest statistics. This is forcing the adoption of effective management solutions that can stop the unwanted deluge of mail and relieve the impact on Internet connections, mail server stores and backup systems.

Using the MessageLabs Anti-Spam service, organizations have flexibility in how the service is deployed, allowing administrators to tailor it to best meet their requirements. Through Spam Manager accounts, users within the organization can have spam redirected to the MessageLabs secure Spam Manager servers, thereby avoiding its impact on internal systems. A notification option for regular reports ensures that each user is kept informed of any redirected email. Messages held in Spam Manager can be previewed, deleted or released to inboxes using a simple, secure web interface.

Spam Manager supports account consolidation, automated purging of spam mails older than a set period, selective deployment and automatic end user “approved list” requests.

Improved Connection-Based Filtering

MessageLabs’ Skeptic predictive technology identifies and blocks spam by utilizing proactive technologies such as heuristics, Bayesian learning, connection-based filtering, smart signatures, fuzzy fingerprinting and dynamic header analysis. Deployed across a global platform, it consistently scans tens of millions of emails every day across the globe and learns from each message, evolving and updating in real time to protect against the newest spam techniques while its filtering accuracy virtually eliminates false positives. Its global database replication architecture means knowledge gained from one part of the network can be replicated worldwide.

Connection-based filtering improves the performance of the service by targeting email messages originating at suspected IP addresses or sent by “zombie PCs” - networks of compromised computers being used to relay spam. MessageLabs’ Skeptic technology also analyzes software signatures, identifying spoofed mails sent via ratware, which are known spam sending programs.

Greater Detection of Double-Byte Character Spam

MessageLabs Anti-Spam 4.0 also includes increased detection and identification of Double-Byte, or Asian character, spam messages. Double-byte character spam is a recent spamming technique capable of bypassing spam filters that are not yet advanced enough to analyze Asian language content. By employing language experts from around the world and processing and analyzing millions of foreign language emails each day across its network, MessageLabs develops customized algorithms to eliminate these types of spam messages and provides our global client base a truly global view of spam.

The adoption of new anti-spam technologies enables MessageLabs to focus on developing innovative techniques to combat dynamic email security threats, which industry analysts expect will continue growing in size and scope over the coming years. The service complements MessageLabs’ Anti-Virus service to virtually eliminate problems caused by email threats, including the convergence of spam, virus and phishing attacks.