FrontBridge plans UK spam assault

Keen to capitalise on this anticipated growth in unsolicited emails, the US-based company is busy signing up resellers and rolling out localised administration centres to bring its managed service for spam filtering, anti-virus, content and policy enforcement and disaster recovery to the UK.

Frontbridge claims to filter out 95% of spam using its own blacklist, proprietary 'finger-print' database, and a further database of 20,000 continually updated rules for defining what is and what is not spam.

In January, the company plans to launch a desktop-to-desktop encrypted email package. Spambusters such as MessageLabs have brought such products to market before but Frontbridge claims its offering, unlike others, will be easy to use. Users will only have to click on a 'send secure' button within Microsoft Outlook to activate the encryption service, the company says.

It is also planning to launch an email archiving service in the September 2004 time frame. Both products are designed to meet new US regulations for data privacy.

But FrontBridge is not a big fan of any anti-spam regulatory activity. "Government legislation won't take care of the problem. It's always too vague and impossible to enforce. And the new EU Privacy Directive is just a little too aggressive," said Jillings.

"Usually the origins of the spam go way beyond UK law. We see a lot of English spam coming out of Russia and China. How do you enforce that? Spammers just rent a server and away they go again."

Companies that opt to install spam-filtering software won't crack the problem either, according to Jillings. "If you've got a big spam problem and try to tackle it in-house the spam sucks up bandwidth and storage. You have to add more servers and then manage the whole thing."

19 September 2003:

16 April 2003:

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