Vircom Leads Race to Eliminate SPAM With 2nd Generation Sieve.

Business Editors & Technology Writers

MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 2002

One year later and more than half a billion spam messages

caught, blocked and quarantined, Sieve proves to be the technology

of choice in the fight against spam and all known spammer tactics

Vircom Inc., a leading developer of Internet infrastructure and security server solutions, today previewed its highly anticipated 2nd generation Sieve-based anti-spam technology - ModusSieve(2) - which is to eliminate even more types of spam on a far more sophisticated scale. Developing anti-spam technology for several years, this newest Sieve evolution is Vircom's crowning achievement and strategically positions Vircom with an aggressive lead over all other vendors in today's oversaturated anti-spam market. ModusSieve(2) is the only intelligent content filtering technology on the market capable of recognizing each and every known spam tactic - including Random Serialization, Viral Spam, Syntax Noise and several others - used by spammers to circumvent today's conventional filters. ModusSieve(2) is to be implemented in the upcoming 2.0 releases of Modus secure messaging and gateway solutions.

After a year of remarkable anti-spam milestones, the success of Sieve is attributable to Vircom's Spam Buster Team and its proactive community of service provider partners who have joined Vircom Anti-Spam Coalition (VASC) to trap live spam and supply Vircom with updated Sieve scripts. In this automated and Vircom-centralized process, all enterprise and xSP clients are protected by spam, 24/7. Currently, the rapid growth of Modus solutions during the last seven months has generated unique results, where Sieve alone is recorded to have filtered more than half a billion (500,000,000) spam messages at a false positive rate of a mere 0.00001%, or one in nearly every million emails.

"Vircom is exceedingly proud to champion the power of Sieve," said Bertrand Houle, vice-president, Sales and Marketing at Vircom. "The total number of blocked spam is anywhere between three and seven times when you include Vircom's other anti-spam and boundary security layers on top of Sieve. What's at stake, though, is the serious need for corporations to put an immediate stop to the loss of employee productivity and ensure company resources are no longer exploited by costly spammer attacks."

Immense savings and fast ROI 

While the hidden costs of spam may vary from company to company, one only has to consider the expense incurred by employees who squander countless hours per year wading through their inboxes to locate genuine email messages. Based on studies by industry analysts, Vircom calculates that by eliminating spam, enterprises may achieve a potential cost savings of up to $60 per employee per year in lost productivity alone, yielding an impressive average ROI of 3 months or less. Adding Vircom's multi-layered anti-spam and boundary security raises the potential savings to more than $170 per employee per year.

Pioneering the open standard of Sieve

The recent explosion of anti-spam products on the market makes it extremely difficult for enterprises and other organizations such as hospitals, universities, and governments, to decide on which anti-spam product is the most effective, proven, scalable and cost-effective. Apart from more simpler protocol filter- and RBL-based products, most other products can be classified as using either a checksum or a heuristics approach to stop spam - at the desktop, server-level, or, as part of a Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering. No one product or method has captured the market's imagination as each possesses inherent weaknesses and address the anti-spam problem only halfway. Alternatively, Vircom sought to develop a solution that was both technically advanced and proactively sustainable by knowledgeable service provider partners.

More than a year ago, Vircom took the lead to fully implement Sieve - an accepted, open standard (RFC 3028) Internet scripting language for filtering email - and transformed it into a proven and highly efficient anti-spam tool, made all the more powerful by the creation of VASC and Automated Intelligent Content Filtering (AICF). Building on the open standard, ModusSieve(2) now introduces more enhanced analysis features that significantly improve the performance and sophistication of Sieve.

This includes being the first to adopt new drafts of Sieve extensions such as Body Purification and Regex (Regular Expressions) which together form a highly developed process to clean out the 'spam noise' spammers typically use to disguise their messages and, as a result, more efficiently filter out junk email. Sieve Analysis is further enhanced in ModusSieve(2) by using only high performance compiled scripts which greatly reduce the overhead when interpreting scripts.

About Vircom (www.vircom.com)

Vircom specializes in advanced Internet infrastructure and security server solutions for the demanding messaging and security environments of both the service provider and enterprise markets. With an uncompromising focus on R&D, combined with exceptionally strong client-vendor relations, Vircom continually provides customers with timely, leading-edge technology that ensure increased competitiveness, streamlined productivity and the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Vircom markets mail server and intelligent secure messaging solutions, as well as Radius server solutions for VoIP, wireless, VPN and dial-up applications.