Alligate Stops Spam - Bites Back From Solid Oak Software, Publishers of CYBERsitter.

Business Editors

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 29, 2003

Solid Oak Software, Inc. has announced the release of its latest product, Alligate, a full featured anti-spam gateway server for Windows platforms. A pioneer in Internet content management, Solid Oak has received numerous awards and international recognition over the past 8 years for CYBERsitter(R), the leading personal web filtering and content management product.

After more than 6 years of research into spam detection and prevention, Alligate integrates numerous state-of-the-art anti-spam techniques that effectively eliminate over 98% of unsolicited and adult-oriented email. Automated training methods allow Alligate to learn users' preferences and frequent correspondents, and reduce accidental blocks to an extremely low level.

In addition to highly advanced context sensitive content recognition, Alligate employs a proprietary method called Adaptive Heuristics to analyze the construction of each message for unusual fingerprints. A local spam "signature" database is maintained, and new messages are compared for similarities.

Solid Oak's research has indicated that up to 60% of incoming spam on any given mail server comes from repeat offenders. To discourage this, Alligate maintains local databases of repeat spammers, and integrates an advanced version of a technique known as "tarpitting."

When a repeat spammer attempts to deliver a message, intentional delays or "sleep periods" are inserted between commands exchanged between Alligate and the remote server. The duration of these delays is determined by how prolific the particular spammer might be and can be configured for "defensive" or "offensive" modes. This has the effect of limiting the spammer's ability to send out mail, thus making it less profitable. An added benefit is that some bulk mail software is designed to weed out slow connections and remove addresses that cannot be delivered quickly. This can reduce the propagation of the address to other lists and result in fewer actual attempts to deliver spam, ultimately saving bandwidth.

Alligate also includes a POP3 gateway, reporting tools, and numerous other utilities for administrators including a full featured remote administration application that allows full control from a remote location.

Alligate is available now and is designed to run on Windows NT and 2000 servers, and is compatible with any mail server on any platform. Pricing starts at $595 for a single domain name.

For information please visit http://www.alligate.com or contact: Brian Milburn, CTO, Solid Oak Software, Inc. 1-800-388-2761 x101 [e-mail].