Anti-Spam Task Force Established by ActiveState; Experts Vow to ''Out-Innovate'' Spammers

Business Wire, March 31, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 31, 2003

ActiveState(TM) Corp., the leader in email content filtering software, today announced the creation of an internal blue ribbon team comprised of the world's foremost anti-spam researchers. The task force members include: Dr. John Graham-Cumming, creator of the popular open source Perl-based Bayesian mail filtering program, POPfile; Tim Peters, creator of SpamBayes, a Python-based open source Bayesian email classifier; Jason Rennie of MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab and creator of the open source tool iFile, an automated email classification system; and Gary Robinson, a leading mathematician on collaborative filtering. The task force is focusing on anti-spam issues affecting the enterprise, and is led by ActiveState's Director of Development, Jesse Dougherty.

Industry analysts Ferris Research estimate that spam will cost corporate America over $10 billion in lost productivity in 2003 alone. The annual cost is expected to double as the amount of spam to U.S. businesses increases from approximately 25% of all email today to nearly 50% in 2008.

Spammers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their techniques, adopting new methods to foil spam-blocking software. The adaptive filtering approach of the Task Force has the predictive capability to identify these methods and their first technical developments will be seen by ActiveState's PureMessage(TM) customers as early as April in the regular spam engine updates.

"Clearly, the tactics of spammers necessitate a technical solution that can evolve to meet their increasing complexity," said Marten Nelson, senior analyst, Ferris Research. "The Bayesian approach is one of the interesting new technologies being developed to accurately identify spam. A technology that learns as it analyzes email is the type of sophisticated system that is required in order to adapt 'on-the-fly.'"

The Anti-spam Task Force is focusing on several technical initiatives to optimize enterprise email messaging, including:

-- Developing "next generation" methods for analyzing email

content to more accurately distinguish between desirable and

undesirable email

-- Pioneering the development of non-spam gateway email filtering

features to enhance organizational productivity

-- Identifying and facilitating collaboration within the

messaging industry to implement standards and email policies

"Spam mutates amazingly fast by using increasingly complex encoding to try to avoid identification. And that is spam's Achilles heel: spammers' increasingly complicated bag of tricks will end up giving them away, and help create the solution for us," said Dr. Graham-Cumming. "I have no doubt that as a team we'll find many ways to spot and stop spam in its tracks."

"Individually, the team members have produced cutting-edge work in anti-spam technologies that is widely accepted as industry standard. Collectively, their achievements will be revolutionary in their ability to accurately identify spam," said Dougherty, director of development, ActiveState. "One of the primary problems to date has been the issue of false positives. An anti-spam system that can learn from experience and adapt is the new approach that's needed to reach near 100% accuracy."

About ActiveState Corp.

ActiveState enables IT professionals and enterprises to increase productivity and organizational efficiency. The Company's PureMessage product empowers organizations to take control of their email communications to protect against spam and viruses, and to enforce email policy. Additional information on ActiveState's industrial strength anti-spam software for enterprises and professional tools for programmers is available at: http://www.ActiveState.com.

ActiveState and PureMessage are trademarks of ActiveState Corp. All other company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.