Illegitimate E-Mail Much Higher Than Reported.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 30, 2003

Illegitimate e-mail messaging over the Internet is currently greater than 90% according to Solid Oak Software, Inc., publishers of Alligate, a powerful anti-spam e-mail gateway product. There are numerous recent reports that have indicated that spam accounts for 50-60% of all e-mail traffic; however, these figures are misleading, according to Brian Milburn, president of Solid Oak.

"These numbers generally represent the percentage of spam that users actually receive in their mailboxes," said Milburn. "This does not account for the actual number of attempted message deliveries to invalid addresses, over-quota mailboxes, and other undeliverable or undesirable mail."

Alligate works by acting as a gateway that accepts and analyzes all incoming e-mail before it is forwarded to the real e-mail server. It employs techniques to identify spammers with a minimum of wasted bandwidth. One technique used by Alligate is called "Adaptive Tarpitting." Alligate keeps a dynamic list of recent spammers, and when subsequent messages are received from the same source, intentional idle periods between commands are inserted to slow down the spammer's throughput. The aggressiveness of this technique is automatically calculated based on the spammer's prolificacy.

"A surprising number of spammers simply disconnect after a few seconds of idle activity. Very little data is exchanged, and this can save a considerable amount of bandwidth," Milburn said. "Alligate uses numerous methods at several points during the message receipt process, including a highly advanced content analysis engine that is remarkably accurate in detecting spam. Our goal is not only to eliminate spam, but to considerably reduce bandwidth consumption. Alligate can reduce SMTP bandwidth requirements by 40% or more."

In addition to Alligate, Solid Oak also publishes CYBERsitter, an award-winning Web filter with over 3,000,000 current users. Many of Solid Oak's proprietary content management techniques used to identify objectionable Web content were adapted for spam detection, bringing almost nine years of content management experience to the anti-spam arena.

Alligate is a complete stand-alone, Windows-based SMTP Gateway server. It supports any number of domains and destination servers on any platform. Alligate is designed to remove virtually all of the administration burden from system administrators.

More information and evaluation copies can be obtained at: http://www.alligate.com.