Unwanted E-Mail, or "spam," has proliferated at staggering rates, and a recent study by Radicati Group (June 2003) notes that spam currently represents 52 percent of all E-Mail traffic and is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2007. Further, spam-related costs are expected to increase from $49 per mailbox in 2003 to $250 per mailbox in 2007.

VeriSign Quick-Start Anti-Spam Service filters all inbound email for spam and threats. The volume of spam email received by businesses has exploded to 55-75 percent of all email traffic. According to the Gartner Group, workers spend on average 49 minutes managing email each day, and that figure is rising. Ferris Research (March 2003) estimates that spam costs corporations more than $10 billion in 2003.

The VeriSign Quick-Start Anti-Spam Service examines all inbound messages in real time, before they reach the enterprise. The service detects anomalies that may represent threats, such as bulk spam deliveries, mail bombs, dictionary attacks, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and preemptively blocks connection from servers sending these anomalies.

The Spam Filtering stage of the service offers:

• Highly accurate spam filtering while ensuring legitimate email is delivered
• Flexible quarantine service for users to review suspicious emails available 24x7
• Low false-positive rate through multiple layer of dynamic filtering

The service uses three filter layers to ensure that unsolicited email is automatically blocked from reaching enterprise networks:

Reputation-based blocking (blacklisting) - VeriSign uses a proprietary blacklist of verified spammers. Most commercial blacklists use a "guilty until proven innocent" approach, which often blocks email from legitimate senders. The VeriSign blacklist contains only addresses of the most egregious spammers.

Fingerprinting - Messages are "fingerprinted" electronically to detect matches with known spam characteristics. VeriSign fingerprinting technology aggregates data from all spam it blocks, allowing the process to become more intelligent and more effective over time.

Rules-based scoring - VeriSign assigns scores to messages based on more than 20,000 unique characteristics of spam and legitimate email. When a message's score reaches a defined threshold, it is flagged as spam.

VeriSign Quick-Start Anti-Spam Service quarantines messages that may have been blocked by our spam filters. Customers can review and retrieve quarantined messages by:

• Receiving digest email with message headers sent periodically to the user
• Accessing the quarantine service from a Web browser

The frequency of digest email delivery can be modified by the administrator to be sent once in three to seven days. The end user can also securely log into the quarantine service from a Web browser to review the quarantined emails.

Multi-lingual Support

The Spam Quarantine also supports international languages including Canadian French, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The end user has the ability to customize the quarantine service and the spam digest email to be delivered in the language of their choice.