Press Releases

Access US Selects Mailshell for Advanced Spam Filtering

Leading Regional ISP Chooses to Fight Spam as a Competitive Advantage

SAINT LOUIS, MO. - November 10, 2003 - Access US, one of the fastest growing Internet Solutions Providers in the Midwest, has selected and deployed Mailshell's anti-spam engine to block spam to its 16,000 users. Mailshell, the OEM anti-spam leader, deployed its engine as a plug-in to Access US' existing CommuniGate Pro email system from Mailshell's partner, Stalker Software.

"Addressing SPAM is an important focus for our company. We switched to Mailshell because of its extremely high accuracy and extremely simple integration with our existing systems," said Colleen McCarthy, Director of Operations at Access US. "The Mailshell engine requires no maintenance, catches virtually all spam without false positives, and our users are thrilled with the level of protection. Mailshell is one of our competitive advantages and an excellent investment."

Access US deployed the FreeBSD version of Mailshell's engine. In addition to FreeBSD, the Mailshell engine is offered and currently deployed by customers in Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, and IBM AIX.

"Access US' deployment will turn spam prevention into a customer retention and revenue-generating module," said Charlie Moore, head of corporate and channel development at Mailshell. "Many ISPs pay a lot for spam filters that don't work, require constant tweaking and cause more headaches than they solve. Early reports from Access US have indicated that their systems and efforts coupled with our engine makes spam go away."

Mailshell's engine is provided to OEM partners as a software developers' kit. In addition to email software companies like Stalker Software, Mailshell's OEM partners include providers of content filtering software, enterprise perimeter security, and personal/desktop security.

The engine identifies spam by using more than a thousand spam-blocking rules, including pattern matches, heuristic functions, and proprietary and third party databases. Complex algorithms are applied to compute the probability that each piece of e-mail is spam. The Mailshell Engine also creates a fingerprint ID for every e-mail message and uses it to continuously analyze new spam, create new rules and adjust the weighting of existing rules. Since spam constantly evolves, customers can opt to receive scheduled or real-time rule updates.

About Access US
Founded in 1995, Access US is one of the fastest growing Internet Solutions Providers in the Midwest, recognized for its quality services and stunning growth by a variety of prestigious entities. It has been twice named one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the United States by Inc Magazine's INC 500 and has been recognized by the St. Louis Business Journal, Deloitte & Touche's Fast 50 and Fast 500 Technology Programs. Headquartered in downtown St. Louis, Access US is dedicated to providing people, organizations and businesses with the highest quality Internet solutions, from security to network support, dial-up to Pogo DSL, T-1 to OC-3, hosting to co-location. Access US is Power. Freedom. Access. For more information about our reliable network backbone and wide variety of Internet services, visit our Web site at http://www.accessus.net.

About Mailshell
Mailshell is the OEM anti-spam leader. The company's products include anti-spam software developer tools and a suite of enterprise and personal anti-spam products. The Mailshell Engine is the only anti-spam solution developed explicitly to integrate spam-blocking technology with common IT components, including security appliances, mail servers, mail clients, anti-virus applications and many others. Mailshell's software recently earned an "Editors' Choice" award in PC Magazine's review of spam filters, and has been dubbed "priceless" by Forbes magazine, "excellent" by the Associated Press and "easy to use" by CNET. Mailshell technology outperformed all other commercial anti-spam solutions including iHateSpam, Symantec™ and McAfee® in a recent study from the leading consumer reporting magazine. For more information visit http://www.mailshell.com.

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