Some IT commentators believe the rising tide of spam is threatening to strangle the Internet`s most widely used facility: e-mail. This may be an overly dire prediction, but it is certainly true that spam is now accounting for a significant proportion of businesses` Internet bandwidth at typically 50% to 70% of all e-mail traffic, it is putting huge stress on virus scanning and content-checking servers, in turn leading to long delays as queues build up on the servers, and it is costing many hours of people`s time. Often, too, spam contains highly offensive material.
Controlling spam can be extremely frustrating: spammers are ingenious at devising ways around content-checkers, and most approaches to date have been ineffective, too expensive to purchase, too complex and costly to administer, or too likely to block valid mail.
Following the signing of a distribution agreement for Africa, Cirrus Techvue today announce the availability of Spam Sleuth Enterprise from Blue Squirrel Software.
Spam Sleuth is a server-based spam blocking solution that works with all e-mail servers. It uses a battery of thousands of tests performed by a suite of plug-in analysers to classify e-mail and then pass, clean, quarantine or trash it. The plug-in architecture makes it a matter of minutes to add new analysers as spammers develop new techniques to subvert spam blockers. Tests range from basic "bad word" counts through HTML analyses to resolving borderline cases by sending a challenge back to the sender to confirm that the mail came from a live person (a given sender, if genuine, will only get challenged once).
Spam Sleuth is a server-based solution capable of processing tens of thousands of messages per hour, permitting central policy determination, but with the option of individual user-customisation. The Spam Sleuth server can be hosted either in the enterprise, or, to save bandwidth, at the ISP end of the connection. Installation takes minutes and gives immediate results. The system can then be tuned on the fly for particular organisational or user requirements.
Spam Sleuth is priced very competitively: a 1 000-user licence sells for under R35 000. Colyn Dee, a Director of Cirrus Techvue, states: "At this pricing a typical organisation can justify Spam Sleuth on the savings on bandwidth utilisation alone, before even considering the benefits of reducing the load on internal servers and the savings in people`s time."
Cirrus Techvue is an independent IT solution provider that has been providing messaging and calendar solutions to corporations for over 10 years, specialising in high-performance, high-availability and high-reliability systems.
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