New Spam Tagging and Email Virus Scanning Service

March 29, 2004

Iophase Advanced Email Scrubbing allows corporate email system administrators to activate spam tagging and email virus scanning almost instantly. Iophase AES requires no software or modifications to existing corporate email server.

IRVINE, CA (PRWEB) March 29, 2004--Iophase Inc. has announced a new spam tagging and virus scanning service targeted specifically at corporate email system administrators and email hosting service providers. "Our product is somewhat unique in that we check for spam and viruses from an offsite location before messages even reach your corporate mail server," said Iophase CEO Owen Scott. "Most systems require that you install expensive hardware or complicated software. Ours is a service-based product that 'intercepts' your inbound messages and sanitizes them before they even get to your mail server." Prefiltering messages offsite reduces the burden on corporate email servers and can reduce bandwidth expenses to hosting service providers and ISPs, according to Scott.

Iophase Advanced Email Scrubbing (AES) uses existing technologies and protocols in a way that allows a business to activate spam tagging and virus scanning in just minutes and with very little initial investment. "Our customers are delighted with the ease with which they can turn up virus protection for their email users," Scott said. "With little more than a phone call, they�re up and running."

"Ease of deployment in the corporate and service provider market was one of our primary design goals with this product," said Iophase President and CTO Eric Hendrickson. "When a company is inundated with inbound spam or worm-infested messages, they simply cannot afford the time it takes to install new software or wait for a new piece of hardware to arrive. Our product reduces the time needed to deploy a fix to just a few minutes."

Iophase AES is activated by modifying a DNS entry called an MX record. DNS is the Internet name service by which friendly names are converted to IP addresses. "Once we've setup AES for a customer, they can turn it on and off at will by modifying their MX record," Hendrickson said. MX records are the bit of DNS that tells the Internet where to send email for a particular domain. "AES can be active in minutes with complete coverage usually achieved within 24 hours," according to Hendrickson. "The amount of time required to see complete coverage depends entirely on how the customer has configured their DNS."

Inbound messages enter the 'scrubber stack' where they pass through a series of processes that analyze messages in several ways. "We look at where the message came to see if it's from a known spammer or spammer-controller machine, we look for 'spammy' keywords and phrases within the message and we analyze the structure of the message in an effort to detect forgeries," Hendrickson said. Worms, virii and executable attachment are removed by Iophase AES before messages are delivered to the corporate email server or service provider's email handling system. Iophase AES also measures the spamminess of a message based on the proposed new SPF standard.

"Because our product is aimed at corporate email administrators and hosting service providers, we never outright reject incoming messages," Scott said. "We feel that customers in this arena will want to retain final say in what happens with their SMTP messages so we leave it up to them."

Iophase AES inserts additional headers in email messages. "By tagging messages in this manner, we allow email administrators to key in on what we've done and further modify or delete messages using features built in to their email server product," Scott said. "By offloading the intensive steps involved with spam and virus detection, corporate administrators and service providers keep their system load and bandwidth consumption under control."

Iophase AES runs on high-availability server clusters in a world-class Internet Datacenter environment. "Our systems are on redundant multi-gigabit networks powered by multiple utility feeds, generators and cooling systems," according to Scott.

Additional information is available at http://www.iophase.com. Iophase Inc. is a privately held corporation based in Irvine, California.

The source of this news release is PRWeb.