Brightmail Anti-Spam™ 5.1 Delivers Significantly Greater Protection From Spam and Virus Threats
2 October, 2003

Dominant Anti-Spam Company Raises Spam Blocking Effectiveness To Over 95 percent – While Still Delivering the Most Accurate Spam Defense Available

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1 -- Brightmail, the anti-spam market leader, today announced the availability of Brightmail Anti-Spam™ software version 5.1. Recent testing by eWeek at WiscNet showed Brightmail Anti-Spam to be 95 to 96 percent effective at blocking spam.

Using Brightmail’s Complete Spam Defense™ technology, this solution offers customers both best-of-breed anti-spam heuristics technology and anti-virus protection. Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.1 provides the industry’s lowest cost, “low-touch” administrative environment -- while delivering an extremely powerful administration feature set for advanced users.

In addition to providing over 95 percent spam blocking effectiveness, Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.1 also offers the best email filtering accuracy rate available at 99.9999 percent (false positive rate of less than 1 false positive message in every 1 million messages identified as spam.) Brightmail defines “Accuracy” as the number of false positive messages incorrectly identified as spam, and “Effectiveness” as the percentage of spam messages that are identified and blocked as spam. Brightmail Anti-Spam software reliably captures email spam and ensures that only legitimate emails messages are delivered.

Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.1 is a server-side software solution that filters email at the gateway and delivers several new features. In particular, it features two new powerful additions: Brightmail Anti-Spam Heuristics Filtering and Advanced Anti-Virus Protection.

Anti-Spam Heuristics Filtering
Brightmail Anti-Spam heuristics analyze email messages for common characteristics that appear in spam messages, and assign points based on the number and type of these characteristics. If the total number of points assigned to a given message exceeds a pre-determined threshold, that message is filtered as spam. Heuristics are automatically “trained” by Brightmail using a set of sample spam messages secured from Brightmail’s patented Probe Network™ -- the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of spam in the world -- to give Brightmail heuristics rules their unparalleled accuracy and effectiveness. Brightmail’s new heuristic technology can predict, with an extreme degree of accuracy, the probability that an email is spam. In addition to being the most accurate and low administration heuristics technology, Brightmail Anti-Spam heuristics are also the fastest -- measuring 2-4 times faster than competitive solutions.

Advanced Anti-Virus Protection
Powered by Symantec, the advanced anti-virus add-on module in Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.1 cleans viruses from messages by scanning attachments and message bodies. The new “Worm Auto-delete” feature removes emails associated with email virus worms like SoBig. Built for maximum performance, but with the same low-touch administration as the anti-spam capability, the anti-virus module provides complete email threat protection.

“Brightmail is extremely focused on delivering the best combination of effectiveness, accuracy and low administration cost to our customers,” said Enrique Salem, president and CEO of Brightmail. “Brightmail Logistics and Operations Centers (BLOC™), the world’s most advanced anti-spam operations centers, deliver complete sets of updated filters to customers every ten minutes. We see and stop significantly more spam than anyone, and Brightmail Anti-Spam™ 5.1 will stop even more.”

Brightmail’s patented Probe Network™ of 2 million decoy email accounts monitors the latest spam email trends and attacks as soon as they enter the Internet. The combination of the Probe Network, Brightmail’s exclusive multi-layered anti-spam software technology, and the BLOC enables quick, accurate and effective defense for email users from new forms of spam whenever they appear. In fact, new spam blocking software rules are automatically sent out to Brightmail customers every ten minutes, 24 hours a day to protect users from spam threats.

As the leader in spam protection, Brightmail filters over 65 billion email messages each month, and identifies more than half as being spam. Because Brightmail filters 11 percent of worldwide email traffic, with more than 275 million email users now protected by Brightmail anti-spam software, it has access to the most statistically relevant sample available on worldwide email traffic trends.

Pricing for Anti-Spam™ 5.1 starts $1,499 per year for 49 users and is available through direct sales and more than 50 resellers worldwide. Anti-virus protection is available for an additional charge. Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.1 is enterprise server-side software deployed at the email gateway and runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems. This latest version of the software will soon be available through Powered by Brightmail™ partners as an integrated solution within leading mail security management appliances, and in best-of-class hosted solutions.

About Brightmail
Brightmail, the anti-spam market leader, delivers anti-spam technology that makes messaging environments secure and manageable. For over five years, Brightmail software has protected the email networks of businesses, government agencies, and service providers with superior accuracy and effectiveness, blocking unsolicited bulk email, or “spam.” Brightmail Anti-Spam™ software protects over 1,200 of the world’s leading enterprises, including Avaya, eBay, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, Cypress Semiconductors, Deutsche Bank, Eastman, John Han*****, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Motorola, SAS and Terra Lycos. Brightmail also provides spam protection for the leading Internet service providers, including AT&T WorldNet, EarthLink, MSN, TelstraClear, and Verizon Online. Brightmail now protects more than 275 million service provider customers, and 4 million enterprise email users worldwide. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Brightmail is a private, profitable company backed by world-class investors and partners. For more information, visit www.brightmail.com.




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