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In Depth: Technology Report
	From the December 22, 2000 print edition

Firms vie to scrape spam off e-mailers' plates

Web technology crackles with sounds, smells, textures and eye-popping views

It's the junk mail of the Internet and it multiplies faster than ants in a chocolate factory, infesting in-boxes with sales pitches, hoaxes or unwanted sexual content.

Often referred to as "spam," these unsolicited messages have increased fivefold in the last year, according to industry analysts, and a variety of Bay Area companies are racing to help both individuals and businesses control the problems spam causes.

"It's a numbers game in that spammers need a very low conversion rate," said Eytan Urbas, vice president of marketing for Mailshell in Santa Clara. "Their costs are so low that they have no problem sending out millions and millions."

That workers waste time clicking on worthless communications is obvious, but spam also costs companies millions of dollars in lost revenue and lawsuits. Entire enterprises sometimes must be shut down when a company's computers become infected with new virus-like forms of spam, said Gary Hermansen, CEO of Brightmail Inc. in San Francisco.

"Someone clicks on a joke and now it infects the PC and gets downloaded," Hermansen said. "So the IT guy has to disconnect all the email ports from the outside world and clean out the mailboxes. It takes a long time if you have thousands of people. There are enterprises that have been down for a week."

ISPs can filter about 50 percent to 60 percent of the spam that comes to them, according to John Buckman, CEO of Berkeley-based Lyris Inc., which makes anti-spam software. But legal constraints prevent ISPs from filtering out more spam.

"Businesses can have policies that are more encompassing than ISPs," Buckman said. "A business can say that it will not let in incoming messages that contain certain words or racist phrases but ISPs cannot because it is a freedom of speech issue. The ISPs don't want to get into legally murky areas."

Several common red flags indicate a spam message, according to Buckman. If the recipient can't reply to a message, it is probably spam. People should also look for common words, such as "make money fast" and have the spam filter count the characters. Spam often uses a lot of exclamation points as well.

"If you don't control spam, it can eat up as much as 20 percent of your company's productivity," said Joyce Graff, industry analyst at Massachusetts firm The Gartner Group.

Founded in 1994, Lyris also offers anti-spam software, producing a system that tests for spam and works with the anti-spam black list RBL (Realtime Blackhole List). The list is issued by individuals and organizations that oppose spam. It is a public list, but most servers cannot access it, said Buckman. However, Lyris' MailShield software will enable them to do so. The company has about 2,000 customers worldwide for its email management and anti-spam programs.

"The difference between our program and others is that it can be centralized so the systems administrator can do it for everybody at once," Buckman said.

Further south in Santa Clara, Mailshell offers a service allowing people to subscribe to newsletters or other information without becoming a target for spam.

According to Mailshell's Urbas, spammers harvest names from subscription lists, which makes legitimate emailers unwitting colluders with them. Founded in January 1999, Mailshell has arrangements with 400 content providers and 10,000 newsletters that users can subscribe to for free. The startup has 16 employees and was privately funded.

The company's users can select either a specific time period or cancel whenever they like, with Mailshell's guarantee that it will happen. If someone wants to subscribe to CNN, rather than using their real email address, Mailshell creates a proxy address to receive it. Then the subscription is forwarded to the real email address. The user could also open a free account on Mailshell's web site and access it that way with a user name and password.

Brightmail, which takes a different tack, is creating a software that can be installed at the mail server point that gets married to a service. The software monitors the Internet for viruses or spam and creates rules that will allow an email through, sideline it, or clean it and then send it through. The 3-year-old company has had three venture capital runs with Accel Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and Cross Link Capital and has 103 employees.

Whatever solution a company takes to combating spam, it must be aggressive and vigilant.

"It's an ongoing chore, like killing cockroaches," Graff said. "Just when you think you have control, they change their tactics. You need a software house that is downloading new rules to you. The best ones are doing it daily, if not hourly."

Danek S. Kaus is a contributing writer to the San Francisco Business Times.

Copyright 2000 American City Business Journals Inc. Click for permission to reprint (PRC# 1.1662.377254)

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