BlackSun Deploys Cloudmark Authority® for Apache SpamAssassin
Canadian Web Hosting Provider Increases Filtering Accuracy by 30 Percent with Industry-Leading Messaging Security Software Plug-In for SpamAssassin
San Francisco – February 17, 2009 – Cloudmark, Inc., the global leader in carrier-grade messaging security, today announced that BlackSun, a leading provider of high-performance Web hosting services, has joined a growing number of mid-market service providers who have successfully deployed the Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin. The Cloudmark plug-in, alongside BlackSun's existing Apache SpamAssassin implementation, delivers higher message filtering accuracy and performance, as well as enhanced protection against spam, phishing and viruses, for BlackSun's more than 30,000 email subscribers.
BlackSun's existing filtering solution wasn't able to stop the evolving spam and virus attacks, resulting in strain on system administrators, customer support teams and end users. BlackSun decided they needed a new solution that would offer more advanced spam filtering and higher accuracy, while remaining in control of their local resources. BlackSun chose the Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin due to its seamless integration into any existing SpamAssassin environment and its proven high accuracy. As a result, BlackSun was able to deploy the solution in less than an hour—this almost-instant integration meant that BlackSun customers could immediately take advantage of enhanced messaging protection and quickly saw a reduction in spam and malware making their way into inboxes. With the Cloudmark Authority plug-in deployed, BlackSun's filtering accuracy has improved to almost 99 percent with near-zero false positives. Further, more than 85 percent of all messages being filtered are now identified as spam and are blocked before they impact customers, resulting in a subsequent increase in customer satisfaction and dramatically reduced customer support inquires.
"Subscriber satisfaction is a top priority for BlackSun and as part of our commitment to continually provide customers with high-quality e-mail and hosting services, we found that Cloudmark Authority was the perfect compliment to our core messaging security system," said Steve Rogoschewsky, CEO at BlackSun. "After investigating several options, Cloudmark Authority was the clear choice due to the solution's unique ability to integrate easily into our existing infrastructure and help us achieve better performance while delivering the most advance protection against spam and malicious attacks. With Cloudmark in place, we have already experienced dramatic improvements in accuracy, seen a significant reduction in malicious e-mail and saved our customers valuable time and effort previously spent combing through spam."
Apache SpamAssassin is an open source platform for e-mail filtering that is already deployed at more than 100,000 organizations. The Cloudmark Authority plug-in for SpamAssassin seamlessly plugs into virtually any existing SpamAssassin infrastructure to instantly improve filtering accuracy and message processing performance. Cloudmark Authority detects messaging abuse with approximately 98 percent accuracy and near-zero false positives, while delivering the highest level of protection against new threat outbreaks and zero-hour attacks. Cloudmark's high accuracy is due to a unique combination of Advanced Message FingerprintingTM technology and real-time corroborated feedback from Cloudmark's Global Threat NetworkTM system, the world's largest live threat monitoring system. In addition, by requiring only a fraction of the processing power of rules-based solutions and automatically distributing the latest threat definitions every 45 seconds, the solution frees IT resources and significantly reduces hardware and datacenter-related costs.
"With spam levels at an all time high and malicious attacks increasing exponentially, it has become vital for Web hosting companies to provide subscribers with the most advanced solution for reducing spam and protecting against malicious attacks," said Jamie de Guerre, CTO at Cloudmark. "It is almost impossible for most independent and mid-market service providers to keep up with the large volume and complexity of today's attacks. The Cloudmark Authority plug in for Apache SpamAssassin gives service providers the ability to stay ahead of attacks and better protect customers from messaging abuse with the highest level of accuracy and performance while keeping IT costs at a minimum."
SpamAssassin users can get a free trial of the Cloudmark Authority software by going to http://www.cloudmark.com/en/serviceproviders/authority-spamassassin.html or by e-mailing satrial@cloudmark.com.
About BlackSun
BlackSun Web hosting is headquartered out of Saskatoon, SK, and services clients across North America and abroad. BlackSun is best known for customer service in the Web hosting industry, and offers high availability hosting, domain name registration, dedicated servers, collocation services, and email solutions. The company was founded in 1998 and has recently expanded its data center spaces as it enters into its Cloud Computing phase. For more information, please visit http://www.BlackSun.ca
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark protects 2 billion global subscribers daily from an explosion in messaging abuses across more operator networks than anyone else. Only Cloudmark defends the world’s largest Mobile, Fixed and Social Media Providers, including AT&T, Comcast, MySpace, NTT, Swisscom and Time Warner Cable, with scalable and accurate protection against the widest range of existing and emerging messaging threats.