The city of Las Vegas has selected Spam Sleuth to manage the torrent of spam flooding the city`s e-mail servers. Colyn Dee, director of Cirrus Techvue, said: "Spam is a problem facing organisations of all kinds. E-mail has become a universal and essential business tool that is being threatened by the enormous volumes of junk mail pouring into the system.
"The City of Las Vegas wanted a tool that would provide comprehensive, centralised control of spam without being an administrative and support-intensive burden worse than the problem it is intended to solve. They chose Spam Sleuth."
Spam management is a balance between closing the spam tap against inadvertently blocking non-spam mail (a "false positive"). The more certain you are of blocking spam, the greater the chance there is of false positives, and a false positive can result in loss of business.
A good spam filtering system will reduce both false acceptances and false rejections, but there will always be some instances of both. Spam Sleuth, however, can deal with suspect mail from an unknown source by notifying the sender immediately and requesting a simple validation via a Web site: the sender is asked to copy text from a graphic image into a field, a task made difficult to automate by partially obscuring the text to defeat OCR software.
Spam is sent out in enormous volumes, and usually with invalid return addresses anyway, so even if the spammer gets the notification, they are extremely unlikely to validate themselves. If they do, of course, you have a valid e-mail address attached to the spammer and you can take other steps to block them.
"Our own experience with Spam Sleuth shows that 45% of our inbound mail is spam, of which we block about 90%," continued Dee. "We have an analysis tool that any company can use to see for themselves the statistics at their site. Companies can use Spam Sleuth for a trial period of 60 days, and monitor the results. They can even run it in monitor-only mode, gathering statistics without stopping any mail to see what effect it would have: this can be the best way of proving to management how big a problem is without otherwise interfering with traffic."
Spam Sleuth is represented in SA, and the rest of Africa, by Cirrus Techvue.
A 60-day trial version of Spam Sleuth can be downloaded from the Cirrus TechVue Web site.
For further information, please contact Colyn Dee or Chris Crozier on (011) 783 1508, or e-mail info@cirrus.co.za
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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.
It also supports and distributes a range of products that include secure payment/document systems; knowledge and message handling systems from Technology Nexus AB; messaging and directory products from Critical Path; and automated notifications systems from Dialogic Communications Corporation. For more information, visit Cirrus-TechVue at www.cirrus.co.za.
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