Crusade Against Spam

The reason is simple: Spam messages are on the rise, soaring to 4.8 million in June 2002 from 880,000 a year earlier, according to Brightmail, an anti-spam vendor in San Francisco.

While many spam-filtering offerings, such as SpamKiller from McAfee.com, tend to be offered as consumer downloads, an increasing number of solution providers are taking up arms against unwanted e-mail that is clogging corporate mail servers and mailboxes and sucking up network bandwidth.

Denis Clark, senior vice president of marketing at Stampede Technologies, a Lotus Notes/Domino ISV partner, said his company is seriously considering launching an anti-spam solution. "People know we have code that resides on both the Domino Server as well as their clients," he said. "They say 'You're on both ends of this, can't you do something?' "

Other VARs agreed. "We are absolutely seeing more demand [for anti-spam software and more demand for server-side tools," said Arlene Bachman, sales manager at Abraxis Networks, an Atlanta e-mail integrator.

The nuisance of spam touches virtually every business. "People are incredibly supportive when they know what we do. I'm very popular at parties," said Enrique Salem, CEO of Brightmail, which has been working with ISPs and large enterprises and is now also seeking to team with large integrators.

"There's a definite need for expertise with this product . . . [for partners who know about firewalls and antivirus products installed at the mail and SMTP gateways," Salem said.

Mail and system software vendors are on the bandwagon. Lotus plans to add server-side anti-spam to Domino 6 to ship later this year. The next release of Mac OS X, code-named Jaguar and due in later this month, will add its own anti-spam filters. Users will also be able to customize anti-spam rules.

Still other products put the onus of mail delivery on the sender.

DigiPortal Software's ChoiceMail requires senders to get the recipient's permission before it will deliver mail. Approved users can get through, but unknown senders must prove they are not spam services. Senders have to fill out a form on the Web that is sent to the recipient for approval. If that is not forthcoming, messages aren't delivered.