News

Postini Declares Shift in Spam Battle

E-mail security and management provider Postini declared this week that its method of blocking spam e-mails based on IP addresses is proving an effective complement to content filtering.

The company claims it is currently blocking 53 percent of all e-mail connections without the need for message scanning. For a managed services provider with 10.75 billion SMTP requests in June, that takes a big load off the scanning engine. IP addresses cannot be spoofed the way that messages can.

"The spam story today is one of connections, not content," Postini founder Scott Petry said in a statement. "Spam content has been changing yet again during the last six months, making it far harder for content filters to detect."

According to Postini, a key weapon in the war against spam is to move up to the SMTP connection. "Since we can't get behind their firewalls, the best thing we can do is watch the spammer's behavior at the connection layer and preemptively shut them down before they do any harm," Petry said.

Clearly the IP address approach isn't a cure-all. Of the remaining 47 percent of messages that came through Postini's system, 76 percent was identified by Postini scanners as spam.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.