The future's Brightmail for MessageLabs customers

UK email security firm MessageLabs has struck a deal with security giant Symantec which will see it include Brightmail anti-spam technology in its own email filtering as it endeavours to better protect its customers from unsolicited email.

MessageLabs will add the Brightmail technology, bought by Symantec earlier this year in a $370m acquisition, to its own managed email security services solution to create a more multi-layered defence against the growing inbox menace presented by spam.

Mark Sunner, CTO of MessageLabs, told silicon.com that bolting on third party, best-of-breed technology has always been at the heart of MessageLabs' plans and this latest development has been something the company has been thinking about "for years".

"From the point of view of offering managed services we are vendor-agnostic and where we believe it will add to that service we will always look to bring in third party solutions," said Sunner. "Symantec's Brightmail technology will contrast with our own database and enable a far more comprehensive approach to filtering out spam."

Sunner said in looking for such deals MessageLabs is not only cutting down its development overheads, but is also showing the market that there is no one-solution - or "silver bullet" - to beat spam.

"You will always need a multi-layered approach now if we are ever to get levels of spam down to truly manageable levels," he said.

The Brightmail anti-spam solution includes at its heart a probe network of more than two million spam traps - dummy accounts with random, unpublished addresses where all email is deemed unsolicited by definition. It also offers non-English language filters and signature based filtering which eliminate the false positive rates associated with keyword or Bayesian filters.

Sunner believes that even companies who claim to be blocking around 90 per cent of spam are sitting on a time bomb as the sheer volume of email traffic means even that 10 per cent will soon represent a severe problem in terms of volume.

"We are looking for around 98 per cent effectiveness," he told silicon.com.

Putting the spam problem into context, Enrique Salem, senior VP of network and gateway solutions at Symantec, told silicon.com: "Spam has grown from eight per cent in 2001 to 65 per cent currently."

And Salem believes filtering is the only way to beat the spammers - despite calls for stricter legislation or even fundamental changes to email, such as micro-payments which would make bulk-mailing prohibitively expensive.

"The industry has not been able to develop an efficient micro-payment system," said Salem. "Converting the word's SMTP servers to understanding micro-payment is a formidable task – while interesting, it may not be the most efficient way to address the problem."

Sunner said MessageLabs expects to take its new patnership to market during Q4 2004 and said customers will receive the Symantec filtering "as standard".