Slamming Spam

Brightmail, based here, brought in Mike Conner, formerly of Trend Micro, to build its channel program. "We'll have relationships with large [systems integrators like EDS, [Computer Sciences Corp. and IBM Global Services, but we'll also partner on a regional basis with VARs," said Conner, Brightmail's vice president of sales.

Conner said he hopes to unveil details of the program in late September or early October.

Brightmail, which is used by large ISPs such as ATT Broadband Internet to protect e-mail users from unsolicited bulk mail, regularly checks spam blacklists and updates servers to block messages from spammers. "It would not be unreasonable to assume that partners would partake in that ongoing revenue stream not only via subscriptions, but [also via consulting services. There may be ways for them to participate in premium support offerings that we bring to market," Conner said.

Solution providers said spam is becoming a bigger deal with their customers, who are increasingly asking for help managing the menace that soaks up network bandwidth, disk space and untold amounts of worker productivity. "We are absolutely hearing complaints, and [spam seems to have grown geometrically over the last few months," said Richard Parvin, organizational manager at Plano, Texas-based integrator EDS.

Brightmail has "spam lookouts" lurking on the Internet, watching for e-mail abuse. "When they start seeing spam, updates go out within 15 to 30 minutes," Parvin said.

Brightmail also performs well when it comes to misidentified mail,a perennial problem with spam control, Parvin said. Users complain that because antispam solutions are often based on key-word searches, they sometimes block messages users want to see, he said. Brightmail "advertises that it misidentifies once every 100,000 times, but in reality, we've had the product in place for about three weeks with a half-million pieces of mail a day, and [there has been only one misidentified message," Parvin said.

Brightmail estimates that unique spam attacks soared to nearly 5 million last month from about 880,000 in June 2001. One reason for the surge could be the more user-friendly naming convention used by many companies, Parvin said. "Addresses are so standard now, it's fairly easy to guess people's [e-mail addresses. In the old days, I was [email protected]. That was pretty hard to come up with," he said.

Another factor could be pure desperation on the part of the spamming companies. "You've got all these sites set up to sell something,adult content, whatever,but banner ads have been discredited and pop-up ads aren't working either because they can be blocked," said John Lorimer, president and owner of Lorimer Networks, an Arvada, Colo., Web consultancy. "So how else do you drive ads? You send e-mail, and if you get one out of 1,000 recipients to buy from you, that helps."

Lorimer uses technologies including Nemx Software's new antispam tool for Microsoft Exchange Server and Vamsoft's Open Relay Filter for Exchange and Windows 2000 SMTP Service to help customers stem the flow of spam mail.