Excedent Reports that Spam Traffic has Grown to 80% of Email
Vienna, Virginia (March 31, 2004) – Excedent Technologies, the leader in managed email hosting and security threat prevention for service providers, today reported that 80% of emails attempting to enter the company’s email hosting network are unsolicited Spam. The company reports that the percentage of junk email identified by its anti-Spam filters has rose consecutively in each of the past 18 months. Virus infected email traffic has also increased three fold in the past six months, rising from 0.5% to 1.5%.
In order to combat this growing epidemic, Excedent continues to strategically evolve its Spam defenses by gathering real-time Spam intelligence from a number of sources. This data is used to track tens of thousands of live email characteristics (“Spam DNA”), which are used to identify Spam. In addition, approximately 25 third-party Spam databases, several DNS checks, and a number of message-formatting tests are used when analyzing each email.
“There is no cure-all solution to the Spam epidemic in sight,” commented Bill Boebel, Chief Technology Officer at Excedent. “While there have been many proposed solutions in recent months, each has its own flaws. A major technical change is needed in the way we send and receive email, however this change is still several years away. The best solution today is to work with a vendor that employs complex filtering techniques to accurately identify and block a high percentage of Spam.”
Excedent incorporates its Spam DNA data into more than 45 constantly evolving tests, which are performed on every email that enters its email system. This allows the company to effectively identifying over 95% of Spam. The system also incorporates several filtering tests designed with the reverse approach of identifying characteristics found in legitimate email instead of identifying Spam. These tests work in conjunction with a weighting system to help eliminate false-positives. Every customer is provided with a safe list in which they can add email addresses to ensure false positives do not occur from those trusted sources. Customers can also adjust their individual filtering settings to decide what to do with Spam once it is identified.
About Excedent Technologies
Excedent Technologies is the leader in managed email hosting and security threat prevention for service providers. The company equips service providers and their small business customers with reliable Spam-filtered and virus-free email. Excedent manages and maintains this critical communications infrastructure, freeing up valuable personnel resources and eliminating the need for customers to purchase email-related software, hardware or additional bandwidth. The company is privately held and serves more than 2,000 customers worldwide. For more information on small business email hosting plans, please visit www.webmail.us. For more information on service provider and enterprise email solutions, please visit www.excedent.com or call 866.EXCEDENT (392.3336).