Cloudmark Announces SpamNet; Stops Spam Immediately and Empowers Consumers to Fight Back Against Spam
Free SpamNet Beta Now Available to Consumers Worldwide
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — June 19, 2002 — Cloudmark, the company that empowers consumers to fight spam, today announced the immediate worldwide availability of SpamNet, the first, easy-to-use Microsoft® Outlook® add-in that stops spam immediately. For the first time, SpamNet enables consumers to fight back against spam with a single click. SpamNet is safe, seamless, and transparent to the consumer. It saves people time by stopping 75 percent of spam automatically, so they only see the mail they care about. SpamNet never deletes an email; it is just moved to the "spam" folder. Every time a consumer uses the one-click "block" feature to remove spam from their inbox, they also notify the SpamNet community at large. This automatically blocks spam for all other SpamNet consumers. Similarly, if a person thinks a certain message is not spam, they can click an "unblock" button and share that knowledge with the network. SpamNet has a Truth Evaluation System (TES) to guarantee that only valid spam messages are blocked. This solution enables "spamfighters" to work together and as the community grows, SpamNet gets more effective. Now consumers can go to http://www.Cloudmark.com to get a free copy of the SpamNet add-in and benefit from instant spam relief.
"Leveraging the power of the people across the Internet to come together as a community to fight spam is a unique and innovative way to address a huge and growing problem for email users everywhere," says Ray Everett-Church, a founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) and Chief Privacy Officer for ePrivacy Group. "Cloudmark's solution is an important step in stopping spam because it empowers consumers with a new tool to take back control of their email."
"Our goal with SpamNet is to be the easiest way for consumers to stop spam and improve their email experience," says Karl Jacob, CEO at Cloudmark who recently joined Jordan Ritter, founder and CTO of Cloudmark and co-founder of Napster.
"Imagine taking the power of the tens-of-millions of people that formed a community around the Napster network and using that network effect to fight back against spam," says Ritter.
SpamNet Leapfrogs Today's Solutions
The power of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network effect means SpamNet captures a higher percentage of spam over time as more people join in the network and become spamfighters.
"Spam is accelerating, and traditional anti-spam solutions are running out of steam," says Kevin Werbach, editor of Release 1.0. "It's time for disruptive technologies to attack this problem. SpamNet's distributed approach is just the kind of shake-up we need."
The advantages of SpamNet are that the network operates automatically, in real-time and is inherently quite scalable and cost effective because of its P2P architecture. Other solutions degrade overtime, SpamNet improves over time. It is also an international solution meaning it understands and fights spam in all languages.
SpamNet Is Successfully Fighting Spam Worldwide
SpamNet is already an effective solution filtering more than five million messages a day based on a passionate open source community that has been actively reporting spam via Vipul's Razor, the open source face of SpamNet built by Cloudmark co-founder, Vipul Ved Prakash. This solution will continue to be available to the Unix community. Today's announcement is significant because it opens up SpamNet to consumers worldwide by making it easy-to-use and widely available to the masses via Outlook, the most popular mail client.
"Our research shows that spam has increased dramatically during the past year, even in corporations where the majority says spam is now one of their most serious email management problems," says Michael Osterman of Osterman Research. "The bottom line is that the spam problem will continue to get worse without innovative solutions to combat it. Cloudmark's solution is a good example of an approach that could deal a serious blow to the proliferation of spam."
Availability
The beta version of SpamNet is available for free from the Cloudmark web site at http://www.Cloudmark.com. To enable even more people to take advantage of SpamNet, Cloudmark will soon deliver a Microsoft Outlook Express add-in that works just like SpamNet does today, followed by other popular mail client add-ins. SpamNet is a key component of Cloudmark's ultimate solution to stop spam for ISP's and Enterprises. Look for more on this in the coming months.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.