New Weapons in the Fight Against Spam and Fraud

It doesn’t matter whether your small business consists of one desktop or a phalanx of server-connected PCs, spam can impact your company’s bottom line in terms of the work hours spent dealing with it and the all-too-real potential for identity theft.

Cloudmark, a San Francisco, Calif.-based company that provides spam protection for over one million computer desktops in 72 countries, today announced its Cloudmark Exchange Edition (CEE) software. According to the company, the software protects SMBs from any e-mail-borne threat such as embedded viruses or phishing attempts.

“Both CEE and our recently announced desktop software, SafteyBar, stop over 98 percent of all spam without producing any false positives,” said Karl Jacob, Coudmark’s CEO. “We’re especially pleased to have added protection against malicious phishing attacks.”

Server Protection
Cloudmark designed CEE to work with Microsoft Exchange Server. “CEE’s seamless integration with Microsoft’s Exchange Server offers companies a big advantage in over-all ease of use,” said Karl Jacob. “The wizard-based installation is easy and straightforward, and it and eliminates the need for complicated, hard-to-configure client-based software.”

CEE’s control console should look familiar to SMB owners and managers &#151 it’s based on the standard Microsoft Management Console that Microsoft Exchange Server uses.

What Others Say About CEE
K&L Wine Merchants, a San Francisco, Calif.-based company with 50 employees sells wines through its two retail stores and over the Internet. Brian Zucker, the company’s vice-president, said the company had been looking for an anti-spam product to help control the over 50,000 spams they received each month.

“We’ve been selling high-end collectible wines over the Internet since 1997, so we were getting a ton of spam,” said Zucker. “We tried two other products before we found Cloudmark CEE, but neither worked very well,” he said. “They either filtered out too much or not enough, and we had way too many false positives, which meant we were missing business-related e-mail.”

Zucker found Cloudmark through EndSight, his reseller. Intially, the reseller installed it, but soon after, Zucker’s company bought a new server, so he reinstalled the software himself. “The whole installation took me aobut an hour,” he said. “It wasn’t hard at all.”

Results
“Prior to installing Cloudmark,” said Zucker, “I spent about 30 to 45 minutes a day deleting spam. Now multiply that number by 50 employees. That’s a lot of wasted time and money.” The company’s been using Cloudmark CEE for about four months now, and according to Zucker, they couldn’t be more pleased.

“The results were so dramatic” he said. “I spend a few seconds a day on spam &#151 if that. At this point, it’s negligible. Spam is no longer an issue for us.”

Desktop Protection
For SMBs without a Microsoft Exchange Server, or for companies that don’t have a large number of desktops, Cloudmark says it offers the same protection in its desktop version, SafetyBar 4.0 (formerly known as SpamNet).

Designed to work in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, SfetyBar 4.0 also provides protection against e-mail-borne threats and phishing attacks. According to Cloudmark, this software protects over one million desktops in 72 countries.

The software provides an interesting feature &#151 a way to fight back against spam and to help improve the protection for the entire community of people who use SafetyBar. If a spam should slip into your inbox (a rare occurrence, according to Cloudmark), you click on the “Block” button. That deletes the message from the inbox, and it also keeps that e-mail from landing in any other SafetyBar user’s inbox.

Pricing And Availability
Cloudmark Exchange Edition: Pricing starts at $599 per year for up to 10 people. Volume discounts apply to larger organizations. The product is available through various resellers, or on the company’s Web site store. You can download a15-day free trial from the site.

Cloudmark SafetyBar: The individual desktop software costs $39.95 per year. You can purchase the product through the company’s Web store.