SpamKiller For Small Businesses

McAfee SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange Small Business is the first in a series of antispam products to be released by Network Associates that incorporates the SpamAssassin technology it acquired with its purchase of Deersoft earlier this year.

"It is a small-business product, designed specifically for this market," said Zoe Lowther, a group product marketing manager at McAfee, Santa Clara, Calif.

The software runs on Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers and provides spam protection for up to 250 mailboxes per server, Lowther said.

SpamKiller uses five techniques to detect spam: content filtering using a list of words and phrases defined by the administrator; heuristics to search for spamlike behavior; integrity analysis, which inspects message headers and layouts; black lists and white lists; and self-tuning by learning the characteristics of a user's e-mail.

The product scans each e-mail against hundreds of rules that rate messages based on their spam content. Depending on their rating, messages are either sent to the user, to a user's junk mail folder, or to a system junk mail folder for an administrator to handle.

Pricing for SpamKiller for Microsoft Exchange Small Business is $20.38 for 101 to 250 nodes. Pricing is for a two-year subscription.

Mike Menegay, Network Associates senior vice president of North America channels and distribution, said the product provides channel partners with a solution that boosts productivity by eliminating the time employees would waste wading through spam.

"It's a huge ROI to companies," he said.

Steve Harper, president of Network Management Group, a solution provider based in Hutchinson, Kan., agreed.

"For businesses of all sizes, the ROI on spam is so quick because when we've installed spam-blocking solutions, we've been able to take as much as 50 percent of the mail off a client's network," he said.

McAfee's new product is priced right and provides service opportunities such as helping customers set up white lists and black lists, Harper said.

Lance Berg, director of systems management at Paragon Development Systems, Oconomowoc, Wis., said there is a lot of interest in technology to combat spam. Spam has become a major problem for midsize and enterprise organizations, which Paragon serves, and smaller organizations are likely to be experiencing similar pain, he said.